Kimberly Blumenthal
speaker
187 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 17 Jul
Kimberly Blumenthal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I'm retired.
I do like floral design.
We should be screaming from the rooftops. This is a misdiagnosis.
Nothing kills bacteria better than these drugs.
I'm an allergist immunologist and clinical population level researcher at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
If your infection is sensitive to these drugs, they are the best drugs out there. From an adverse effect profile, they're also much more benign than other antibiotics.
Unless you happen to be allergic. Penicillin allergy was described immediately after penicillin was released, and it's the same with all drugs. You release new drugs, and we find patients that are allergic. But antibiotic allergy is misdiagnosed most of the time.
When we have infections, we get rashes.
Yeah, especially in children. Children get rashes when they have infections. Those infections are treated with antibiotics. There's misattribution of allergy.
Absolutely. For years and years, we have had this idea that an infection requires antibiotics. And only like the past five, ten years, we've tried to pull back on that because of antibiotic resistance.
Don't act too fast, right? I think it's good to be a really busy parent and not be on top of it and rushing them in right away.
Yeah, and some people do it better than others. There are these fantastic discharge prescriptions that aren't actual prescriptions. Things like rest and drink plenty of water and Nana's chicken soup. Take Tylenol or Motrin for a fever. And then if things a week later are still in the same place or things worsen, then call me back and then we treat with antibiotics.
I really was drawn to the idea of how important the choice of what drug was the key decision, what drug is right for this patient. I pretty immediately realized that regardless of what nonspecific garbage was listed on the allergy list, it really changed care. And I just got totally distracted as to like, does it need to change care? Why is there a two-tier system?
If you have an allergy, you treat with this, but everyone else who doesn't have an allergy gets this. I realized that what we were calling allergy was mostly side effects.
Something way too big to hammer in the nail. Some sort of mallet is like, you know, I don't do tools and hardware.
Sure. Maybe could get the job done, but by kind of making a mess. Yeah.
If I were to see something like five patients for this a week myself... And I've been doing it for over a decade. We're near 3,000 patients. I've seen probably 20 allergic.
Yeah, they present to my clinic at the suggestion of their primary or their surgeon or themselves. Yeah, I would say it's probably been 3,000 patients that I've seen myself in. I know and remember two severe reactions. That's it. The rest have been rashes.
No, and this is why we should be screaming from the rooftops is misdiagnosis. This is a missed diagnosis. Everyone has something on their chart that's wrong, and nobody is screaming about taking it off. We reconcile medicines every visit. I'm taking this. I'm not taking this. We try to take care to make sure what is in the chart is correct.
This is something that is not ever addressed and is incorrect in the majority of people.
Showing 141–160 of 187 · page 8 of 10
← Previous
Next →