Clinical Tips: Improving Patient Care With White Noise

Some Social Media and Advertising Tips: Part III

1. Wrap your doors with the services you provide: Patients may not know that you provide certain services, and the wraps can be engaging.

2. Have “brag” books of the services and procedures you provide with real-world results: We have a lot of content in the books including Botox, fillers, laser services, biopsy, and sebaceous hyperplasia destruction. The pictures show good results and are not a collection of my very best results. Patients know that they will have a scar when they have surgery.

3. Put your logo and verbiage on your photos: Free apps like Over can help you make professional-looking photos and content.

Dr HL Greenberg
Las Vegas, Nevada

Reducing Noise Between Clinic Rooms

I credit Neil Shah, MD, with sharing this great tip with me. To prevent sound from traveling through examination room walls, I plugged in a Dohm sound machine in each room ($45 each). These are the same sound machines that are used in baby nurseries. The white noise they create works better than music to obscure noises and voices from adjacent examination rooms. The bonus is that the white noise is so relaxing that I often find patients dozing off in the room.

Dr Heather Downes
Lake Forest, IL

Oooh, Cold Hands!

My daughter is in medical school and learning physical diagnosis. She said that doctors need to keep hand warmers in their pockets so that they do not touch patients with cold hands.

Dr Jo Herzog
Birmingham, AL

Baby Toe Sign

Dystrophic toenails can be caused by many things: a fungal infection, psoriasis, tight-fitting shoes, etc. I have observed that if you examine a patient with onychodystrophy of the toenails and look at the skin between the fifth and fourth digits, that if there is no scaling of the skin in that area, then in most cases the toenail changes will NOT be due to a fungus.

In other words, most cases of onychodystrophy of the toenails that are due to a fungal infection show scaling between the “baby toe” and the 4th digitals. This can, of course, be verified by taking fungal scrapings. I call it the baby toe sign.

Perhaps not as useful as the Hutchinson sign or Koebner phenomenon, but I find it useful especially as I have seen over the years so many patients being prescribed antifungal pills and creams, often without cultures and without the other causes of onychodystrophy being seriously considered.

Dr John Turner
Toronto, Canada