The work has begun!

Greetings friends, family, and other backers of my Experiment page. I wanted to let everyone know that I have successfully traveled to Nijmegen (pronounced quite a bit differently than initially thought...) and have begun work at the Radboud UMC. I am working closely with Dr. Matthijs Kox, his PhD student Guus Leitje, and some colleagues in the Internal Medicine program. We are busy optimizing a new protocol that will allow us to more deeply understand the alveolar macrophage - a cell that is always busy scouring our lungs for potential sources of infection. Once our protocol is optimized, we will hopefully start to unravel these twin mysteries: why is pneumonia the primary infectious cause of sepsis, and why do septic patients develop hospital acquired pneumonia above all other infections?

Beyond my work in the lab, I will be enjoying some shadowing opportunities in the Medical Intensive Care Unit at the Radboud UMC, as well as learning more about some of the cutting edge work being done by the intensive care physicians here in Nijmegen and throughout the Netherlands (i.e. their world class intubation weaning protocol and physiology studies). Conversations with colleagues have revealed numerous differences in our health care systems, which I will be discussing here and in other posts. The first thing that must be discussed is the Dutch Primary Care system. I've attached the following article (hopefully everyone can gain access to it) so folks can get a better understanding of the system. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22668606  

The short story: everyone has a general practitioner (GP), GP visits are free (including all labs and tests ordered by the GP), and the GP is the gatekeeper to all specialists and hospital services (with some exceptions). I believe this is the same as the NHS in the UK, but it is incredible to hear about a primary care system that is working so well. In the US, there is definitely a shift to focusing on Primary Care (more emphasis at the level of the undergraduate and graduate medical education), but until physician compensation changes and with it insurance reimbursement rates, I think we will struggle to fill the ranks of our GPs.

Anyway, thanks for your support and I look forward to keeping up with this on a semi-regular basis! Please comment below if you have any questions!