I have the privilege to work in a profession where astonishment and revelation awaits me behind each exam room door.
In a typical clinic day, I open that door up to thirty plus times, close it behind me and settle in for the ten or fifteen minutes I’m allocated per patient. I need to peel through the layers of each person quickly to find the core of truth about who they …
I’m grateful to be open for business. This doctor is in.
Healing others shouldn’t be killing you. This warning in a physician recruitment ad pulled me in, while an image of a choking stethoscope triggered flashbacks of my years in medicine. Many physicians feel like they’re choking. Squeezed in from every angle. Stretched to the max. Spent.
And they feel this way right as they open the door to greet their next patient.
I know of a prominent office that lost three superb …
Healing patients shouldn’t be killing doctors
Sometimes as a travel medicine doctor you feel like Red Riding Hood’s mother.
Your patients come in asking for advice about upcoming travels. Much like Red’s mother you want to wrap your patients up in a protective cape and guide them on safe travels.
You want to teach them to avoid any wolves that may be lurking out there. Like impetuous teenagers, your patients don’t always listen.
And Zika virus just made it worse …
This is what you should know about Zika virus
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My son Acton is truly a miracle baby because he was not even supposed to be here. I had gone through four years of infertility with three miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy (pregnancy in my fallopian tube), causing my left tube to be removed. After my last miscarriage, I was told I was in perimenopause and had less than 1 percent chance of ever getting pregnant again, let alone carrying …
The story of how a NICU nurse became a NICU mom
“Hey mon, you alright?”
“You have a blessed day.”
“How is your morning walk pretty ladies?”
“Yeah mon, no worries. Everything alright.”
These “stock phrases” are just a few of the things I heard each and every day while staying in Negril, Jamaica. I travelled to the island to take a short vacation and also attend a destination wedding this past month. While on the island, I was pleasantly greeted by the local Jamaicans …
Dare to make yourself more human
If you have been thinking about becoming a vegetarian, there’s no better time to make the switch than the beginning of a New Year. For those of you have been on the fence, 2015 provided us with a few more reasons — like saving money and losing weight — to make the dietary transformation.
Reason #1: Vegetarian diets increase metabolism. Vegetarians have a lower body mass index compared to those eating meat, …
4 reasons to go vegetarian in 2016
It was that time of the year at the cancer center — with treats all around, chocolates, cookies and gingerbread houses, gifted from the patients to their doctors. Yes, it was the excess sugar holiday season. Most of these patients were follow-ups — the already established patients of the cancer center, expressing their gratitude in taking care of them in the tough times earlier in the year. Among all the …
Stop comparing cancer with diabetes
Part of a series.
Among Medicare recipients, those discharged from the hospital incur about a 20 percent risk of an unplanned readmission within 30 days. The number is higher for some conditions such as heart failure. This is the result of a terribly dysfunctional health care delivery system. Of course some patients will need readmission; the number can never be pushed down to zero, but 20 percent is appalling.
Why …
Reducing hospital readmissions shouldn’t be that difficult
I am old enough to remember standing shirtless on a chilly afternoon in the school gym lined up with my fellow teammates while a volunteer doctor went down the row clearing us for school athletics in a medical assembly line. This scene has been a familiar rite of passage for generations of student-athletes. However in this day of modern preventative medicine, is the sports physical the best we can do …
Is the sports physical hazardous to your child’s health?
Curiosity and apprehension. I experience this tension as a young man ushers me through large daunting doors with “Authorized Personnel Only” posted in bold red letters. Inside, a massive machine dominates the room, and yet my focus turns to the patient lying on the table, face covered in a white mask holding his head still while the technician targets the malignant brain tumor.
“All right in there?” the specialist asks, and …
My father is no longer a practicing neurologist, but he is forever a doctor
“As a mom and a doctor, what advice would you give a third-year medical student trying to choose a specialty?” the bright-eyed med student asked me.
Her smile was ear to ear, and I didn’t want to burst her bubble. This is a complicated question to ask and the answers change as life changes. I chose OB/GYN because it was the only specialty I truly fell in love with. For me, …
Physicians should invest time in work-life balance: It’s priceless
I was confused. Perhaps, I needed another cup of coffee. The chart did not make sense. Ellen, who I was about to see because she was transferring her care, was receiving medication for cancer that was a simple pill; inexpensive, with few side effects. What confused me is that it was obvious the therapy would not work.
Baffled, I called the oncologist who had been treating Ellen for two years. A …
It’s often a bad idea when patients order treatment
Recently, I read an article about a new mother’s experience taking her toddler to the emergency room after a face-first fall onto an iron table, bleeding profusely. After her child was evaluated, it was determined that no serious injury was sustained, and no further intervention (i.e. stitches) was needed, and the toddler was discharged home with some wound care instructions and a popsicle. When the mother subsequently …
Patient satisfaction often forces doctors to “do something”
As I sat on the edge of her bed discussing delivering options, a sweet mom of twins (who we had decided to welcome to the world at just a few pounds each) looked at me and asked a question that many of us are asked: “What’s safest? What would you do if it were you?”
Most of the time we present options as best we can. If one is clearly the …
Why patient education needs to be more YouTube-friendly
An excerpt from Physician Suicide Letters — Answered.
When is a taboo topic no longer taboo? When is it OK to stop hiding behind euphemisms? When is it safe to tell the truth? The answer is now.
This week I uploaded 53 chapters of physician suicide letters in a book that became a #1 Amazon …
What you don’t know about medical training and culture can kill you
All of us who care for the poor, the illiterate, the poorly educated, the immigrant, the frail, and the abused know this: caring for them involves many challenges that aren’t picked up by Medicare computers or big data. Simplistic calculations about quality metrics such as hospital readmission rates have been way off the mark at capturing the complexities of caring for these patients.
The problem with penalizing poorly performing hospitals
There’s been a bit of kerfuffle over resident duty hours lately.
For those unfamiliar with the topic, physicians in training in the United States have traditionally lived in the hospital — hence why they were called residents — and available to patients 24/7. Over time, concerns about patient safety led to limits on how many hours could be worked consecutively in the hospital. In 2003, the maximum number of …
Why resident work-hour restrictions should be individualized
There’s no doubt that technology is changing the face of medicine. Today, surgeons can perform minimally-invasive procedures with the assistance of a robot or replace missing limbs with bionic ones. Radiologists can read imaging studies from halfway around the world. There are specialists providing remote services to patients with strokes, women with high-risk pregnancies, and critically ill neonates. Mental health professionals are now able to offer life-changing care to patients …
Don’t replace your pediatrician with a smartphone
Every primary care physician has had this experience: We refer a patient to a cardiologist, pulmonologist or gastroenterologist and get a note back that says our patient’s symptoms are not cardiac, pulmonary or GI related. “Not my department,” in essence.
Medical specialties are organized by organ or organ system, and not by symptom. This really leaves primary care doctors in the default role of being specialists in diagnostics. I often say …
Primary care doctors are specialists in diagnostics
It was never his intention that the name would stick. A decade ago, when he first began working in the restaurant, some of his fellow employees knew that he was formerly a practicing physician and started to call him “Doc.” Although many of his coworkers had since moved on, taking the knowledge of his previous profession with them, his moniker persisted.
Doc liked the simplicity and tedium of his bartending job. …
He felt that doctors were no longer helping people. Here’s why.
