Letter from the editor

*Please note: you cannot receive credits for this posting*

By Dr. Steve Wong, Medical Director, This Changed My Practice, UBC CPD

Who would have thought 2021 could bring with it even more dreadful events than the year before? Just as the turning point seemed on the horizon, the pandemic threw us a new uncertainty. In British Columbia, nature’s fury has been unleashed — the heatwave and devastating fires over the summer and unprecedented floods this winter have led to even more suffering.

In this past year, we all became familiar with words that were previously obscure — terms like heat dome, atmospheric river, and now Omicron have entered our common vernacular.

Yet, there are words that I’m glad we’re hearing more often these days, too. Words like representation, reconciliation, and the focus of our last article this year: compassion.

We take comfort in traditions and customs, and so many have been disrupted in these last two years.  A tradition at TCMP is to share our “Top 5” articles based on reader-generated engagement, so here are this year’s Top 5 as determined by reader votes for “My practice is (will be) changed and improved”:

1. Clearing up the confusion around pneumococcal vaccines by Dr. Susan Hollenberg
2. Rate versus rhythm control in patients with atrial fibrillation: time to change the paradigm? by Drs. Christopher C. Cheung, Kenneth G. Gin, and Jason G. Andrade
3. Specialists and Family Practice: Tackling the pseudo-penicillin allergy epidemic together by Drs. Raymond Mak and Tiffany Wong
4. Adult ADHD — Practice Tip by Dr. Elisabeth Baerg Hall
5. Sodium Glucose Cotransporter 2 SGLT2 Inhibitors: New drug class in the treatment of Heart Failure with Reduced Ejection Fraction — DAPA-HF and EMPEROR-Reduced trials by Tanveer Brar, Doson Chua, and Laura Atiyeh

As always, I wish to express my gratitude to our readers, authors, editorial, and support team — and for the first time, our speakers that made TCMP and TCMP-Live! conference so rewarding to be part of.

Please be safe out there and know that your efforts to support patients, family, and friends are still appreciated. I wish you all health and joy, and, as much as you can get these days, a chance to just take a pause.

I look forward to connecting with you again next year, and I hope the keywords of 2022 will be notably more optimistic.

Steve Wong, MD, FRCPC
Internal Medicine
Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, UBC
Medical Director, This Changed My Practice, UBC CPD

PLEASE NOTE:
NO CREDITS ARE GIVEN FOR THIS POSTING