Physicians spend a lot of time counseling patients on the phone. Often, these conversations occur at night with patients we have never met before. When I am on-call in the evenings or on the weekends, these are some typical phone calls I receive from patients I have never met. I have a very bad stomach ache for the last hour. I started having rectal bleeding an hour ago. My wife tells me that my eyes are yellow. My chest is hurting. It feels different from my usual heartburn. How do we manage patients with issues like those above? We get hundreds of calls like this every year. Do we send every patient to the emergency room just to play it safe? Do we tell them to hang in there and to call their regular doctor when office hours open? How can we be sure that a simple stomach ache isn’t the first warning of appendicitis or some other severe abdominal condition? My After Hours Medical Equipment Phone medicine relies on an entirely different skill set than physic
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