How much alcohol is too much? For years, we’ve been using numbers from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). It defines low-risk drinking as:

• Women
  No more than 3 drinks per day; and
  No more than 7 drinks per week
• Men
  No more than 4 drinks per day; and
  No more than 14 drinks per week

where 1 drink = 14 grams of absolute or “pure” alcohol. This corresponds to 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of table wine or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits (e.g., vodka).

All that is about to change. A new study involving about 600,000 people found that drinking targets should be a lot lower—probably no more than 100 grams of alcohol per week. This corresponds to just 7 standard drinks.

The study found that people who consume more than 100 grams of alcohol per week had a higher risk of dying. They also had more heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases.

Here’s the flip side: drinking less appears to add years to your life. For example, 40-year-olds increase their life expectancy by at least 1 year when they reduce alcohol intake from NIAAA’s current upper limits to no more than 100 grams per week.

I’ve loaded these data into my longest running PowerPoint slide deck (Slides 14–16) and am encouraging my students to change the advice they give to patients. Please pitch in and start spreading the word!

I’m honored to be the keynote speaker at the Minnesota Academy of Family Physicians’ Spring Refresher. Here’s a fairly final version of my PowerPoint.

The bulk of my presentation will be devoted to the systematic management of major depressive disorder. The STAR*D Study, which has only become more relevant over time, will provide the overall framework.

I’ll also be discussing suicide assessment and how to monitor various psychotropic medications.

I attended Hazelden Betty Ford’s Professionals in Residence (PIR) program in 2002. I started the week thinking I was going to be a family physician—I was a resident at the time—but was hooked on addiction (bad pun intended) by the end of the experience. And so began my odyssey to an eventual career in addiction medicine.

I returned to PIR as faculty in 2009 and have been teaching for the program ever since. I lecture on Screening, Brief Intervention & Referral to Treatment (SBIRT—not to be confused with Ernie and Bert!).

My slide set has evolved considerably over the years. This blog post contains the latest and arguably greatest.

I’ve been treating opioid addiction with buprenorphine (Suboxone, Zubsolv, Bunavail) since 2005. Here’s a conference presentation that covers some perennial questions that I receive from primary care providers. I’m happy to bring the slide deck to you for a live training.

I recently stumbled upon The Medicine of Place in a coffee shop in St. Cloud, Minn. The authors, Jerry Hansen and Chuck Norwood, are local guys. In fact, Chuck works a few doors down at the Paramount Center for the Arts, where I connected with him a few days later. (I see patients at the Stearns County Jail, which is right around the corner.)

The book contains perennial wisdom and beautiful photographs, and is a reminder that there are still mystics among us. Consider the following page (click to enlarge):

The title is published by North Star Press, also in St. Cloud.

Many thanks to Curtis Weinrich, with North Star Press, and Chuck Norwood for permission to post the page above.

I’ve been teaching evidence-based medicine at the University of Minnesota since 2004. I have a particular interest in evidence-based physical diagnosis; that is, the relative value of history and physical exam data for establishing and excluding disease. This is the realm of pretest probability, likelihood ratios and Bayes’ Theorem.

I reviewed the National Early Warning Score (NEWS) in my December 2017 column in Today’s Hospitalist (where I contribute a numbers-oriented piece every other months). NEWS is a deceptively simple mash-up of vital signs that accurately predicts 24-hour mortality. Low scores—which is where my interest lies—have exceedingly high negative predictive value (translation: very few people with low scores die).

Nerdy footnote: Please check out JAMA’s Rational Clinical Examination and Stephen McGee’s Evidence-Based Physical Diagnosis for more numbers for doctors.

You’ll be running into me throughout the Minneapolis skyways the next several months. Here’s a panel  that just went up at Radisson Blu.

Many thanks to Deb Anderson and Christine Foerster at Outfront Media. And, of course, to my wife, Joan, for the art direction and production. She’s also responsible for our print ads in Minnesota Monthly  and my website.

I’m pleased to be presenting at the HealthEast Spine Symposium on November 30th. My topic is resilience, which is the flip-side of burnout.

Although I don’t plan to spend a lot of time on it, healthcare leaders should consider Slides 41 and 42, the underlying study and my commentary in Today’s Hospitalist. In short, bad bosses contribute to burnout.

The relationship between personality structure and burnout and is also worth a look (Slides 43–46 and the related study).

You can find my PowerPoint here or by clicking on the image below.

I’m pleased to be presenting at the Minnesota Academy of Family Physicians’ first-ever Narrative Medicine Workshop. The event will occur on Tuesday, November 28th, at 6 p.m. Registration is free and food will be provided!

You can find my PowerPoint here or by clicking on the image below.