Healio Rheuminations

This episode focuses on the clinical aspects of endocarditis you can catch in the exam room, emphasizing the joint and skin manifestations, along with some interesting historical insights on Osler nodes and Janeway lesions.

Infectious endocarditis can present with rheumatic features in 15% to 25% of cases. This series focuses on what a rheumatologist should know about the clinical puzzle of endocarditis.

How common is asymptomatic bowel involvement in patients with peripheral or axial SpA? Can we use NSAIDs in these patients? What’s the difference between sulfasalazine and mesalamine? Listen to hear what a rheumatologist should know about IBD!

The last episode in the series highlighting how the structure of the antibody was discovered, as well as how a chicken butt was critical in understanding B cell biology.

Learn about the discovery of immunodeficiencies leading to the use of pooled immunoglobulin as therapy, the struggle to use it intravenously and the eventual use in autoimmune disease.

Part 2 of this series explores how we began to measure antibody levels and how serotherapy evolved and was used to investigate multiple diseases (I’m looking at you, pneumonia). We’ll also learn how advances in laboratory techniques like electrophoresis paved the way for a better understanding of the antibody.

COVID-19 has brought up the use of the old remedy convalescent serum. What is it? Did it work? This series walks us through the history of the serum, how it was discovered, how it was first used, and how it inspired the field of immunology.

With COVID-19 and the question of whether glucocorticoids could be beneficial, this episode digs into the data on the use of glucocorticoids in the setting of infections, from pneumonia and septic arthritis, to meningitis and septic shock.

This episode delves into the history of Whipple’s disease — from its initial description, to the lengthy process of proving it’s an infectious disease.

This episode dives into the rare Whipple’s disease, focusing on the articular manifestations of this infectious masquerader and when a rheumatologist should consider it in the differential.

This episode explores the history of cryoglobulinemic vasculitis, from the first person who froze a tube of blood and noticed something strange happened, to the discovery of hepatitis C. We also throw in how the lab test for cryoglobulins is performed and some of the data we have on therapy.

In Part 2, I sit down with nephrologist Ali Mehdi, MD, and neurologist Ghulam Abbas Kharal, MD, MPH, to discuss their different specialty perspectives on working up patients with suspected cryoglobulinemic vasculitis.

Try your hand at this medical mystery, which is followed by some didactics on a fascinating disease which will hopefully make sense of this inscrutable title.

In this episode, Leonard H. Calabrese, DO, is joined by his colleague and daughter Cassandra Calabrese, DO, as they discuss specifics of irAEs, including unusual toxicities, rheumatic conditions associated with checkpoint inhibitors and the rheumatologist’s role in this new area of medicine.

Checkpoint inhibitors have changed the field of oncology, as well as our understanding of autoimmunity. This episode, hosted by Leonard H. Calabrese, DO, walks us through the history of checkpoint inhibitors —from Dr. William Coley’s use of infections in cancer to the development of PD-1 inhibitors.