Mendel's Garden: Selected Medical Topics
by
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Since Louisiana’s population is still made up of over 25% Medicaid recipients and around 20% uninsured, and the state remains 48/50 in its health outcomes, caring for this mass of indigent patients remains a significant challenge. The verdict is still out as to whether this transformation in healthcare delivery can be achieved without deterioration in health outcomes. Since Louisiana has always remained close to or at the bottom in the nation for health outcomes, a further drop may not be a long ways to go, but is still undesirable. The ghost of Huey P. Long continues to haunt Louisiana, but perhaps with the dismantling of the state-driving healthcare system, that ghost will, at long last, be put to rest.
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About the Book
“MENDEL’S GARDEN: SELECTED MEDICAL TOPICS” contains a collection of short non-fiction texts covering a wide variety of medical issues. Dr. Holcombe intends each short text for the lay audience, and there are consequently no rigorous references as would be found in scientific publications. Instead, the topics are intended to introduce the average reader to a number of current issues that affect the public, from cancer to Cyclospora and from contingency fees to health care costs. While understanding that medical publication are out of date before they are published, there should still be something of interest for just about everyone. Feel free to hop from subject to subject and share them with friends and colleagues. Medicine should be accessible to everyone in all of its good, bad and ugly aspects. Cover design: “Cranial Inspiration: Portrait of Dr. David Holcombe,” by Terry Strickland.
About the Author
Dr. David J. Holcombe was born in San Francisco, California in 1949 and was raised in the East Bay Area in the shadow of Mount Diablo (in Contra Costa Country). He received a B.S.A. from the University of California at Davis in 1971 and a M.S.A. from the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1975. He subsequently traveled to Belgium for medical school, where he graduated with an M.D. from the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels in 1981. He completed a residency in internal medicine at a Johns-Hopkins affiliated clinic in Baltimore in 1986. He and his wife and children moved to Alexandria, Louisiana, where he worked as an internist at a multi-specialty clinic for the next 20 years. In 2007, he changed his orientation and began to work in public health in Central Louisiana. During his academic training and subsequent professional career, Dr. Holcombe has continued to write, paint and folk dance. His self-published works include collections of short stories, “Like Honored and Trusted Colleagues” and “Cappuccino at Podgorica,” and short plays, “Beauty and the Botox” and “Old South, New South, No South.” Since 2004, eight of his plays have been produced at the Spectral Sisters Productions annual Ten Minute Play Festival in Alexandria, Louisiana. He and his charming wife, Nicole, continue to live in Alexandria, where they contribute to the cultural life of the city, region and state. Dr. Holcombe regularly submits medical articles to various local publications, many of which appear in this volume, “Mendel’s Garden: Selected Medical Topics.” He serves on many advisory committees and boards, and serves as the volunteer Medical Director for Community Health Worx, a local working people’s free clinic, and a volunteer Civil Surgeon for the Interfaith Immigration Group of Central Louisiana.