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It’s time to focus medical education on training the whole person

Medical Education

January 23, 2021

Here I am, 17 years out of my fellowship training, and I’m just getting some of the most important training of my medical career.

I continue to believe that my medical school, residency, and fellowship training were all outstanding. However, either I missed something in the course catalogue, or like for most medical students, residents, and fellows, there were some glaring omissions in the course offerings.

Here are some of the courses …

Why do people keep going to church?

Edwin Leap, MD

Physician

January 23, 2021

Physicians in general are a pretty intelligent group of professionals. However, we sometimes make the mistake of thinking that we must also know a lot about almost everything because we know a lot about one particular thing. However, given the exploding pace of advancing knowledge, that idea is hubristic. But it isn’t just science and technology where we fall short.

During the COVID pandemic, one of the things most contentious has …

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Why do people keep going to church?

Medicine in the shadow of the Confederacy

Megan S. Lemay, MD

Physician

January 22, 2021

To get to my primary care clinic in Richmond, VA, my patients and I must walk past the Confederacy’s White House. Our emergency room sits in its shadow. Each day, I walk past the three-story white building surrounded by my hospital on three sides. Renamed the American Civil War Museum, it is now repurposed to sterilize hospital staff masks. The faded letters of a long-removed sign on the front read …

How 5-star reviews generated over $225,000 in revenue for my practice

Orrin Franko, MD

Physician

January 22, 2021

I’ll cut straight to the point: Collecting 5-star Google and Yelp reviews straight out of fellowship generated over $225,000 in new revenue from online patient referrals. And I have the data to prove it.

I joined my partner as a hand fellowship graduate four years ago. He already had a very busy practice with over 100 new patient visits a month, on average, and my arrival allowed him to cut down …

Why this physician misses the waiting room

Shannon E. Scott-Vernaglia, MD

Physician

January 22, 2021

“Please wait. The meeting host will let you in soon.”

I am in the virtual waiting room for my weekly therapy session, the little waiting room box dragged to the side of my screen as I respond to clinical messages. I put off stretching to reply to an email, remaining in the chair I’ve been sitting in all morning hosting my own virtual visits for patients.

I hate my chair; I hate …

Getting the COVID vaccine: a behind the scenes look

Nesrin Abu Ata, MD

Conditions and Diseases

January 22, 2021

Don’t let images deceive you. You may think you see everything in my picture after getting the vaccine, but you don’t. Let me take you behind the scenes of my life this past year. As I can only imagine what being behind the scenes of your life has been like for you.

What you don’t see in the picture is my yearlong of agony, tears, hard decisions, and losses, like all …

COVID vaccines: side effects, myths, and madness

Allison Edwards, MD

Conditions and Diseases

January 22, 2021

I received my COVID vaccine on December 21st before starting an ER shift; sitting in the cold, plastic chair in a hallway-turned-vaccine-clinic, I tipped my head back to blink tears into submission as I reflected on making it this far in the pandemic without contracting COVID. Four days later, after three twelve-hour shifts, I tested positive for COVID.

The COVID vaccine did not cause my positive result; getting exposed …

I lost my father during the global pandemic

Kelly Lisciandro, DO

Physician

January 21, 2021

I had a dream last night. I dreamt that my father wasn’t dead.

It was jumbled in so many ways. But I was able to talk to him in my “sleep.”

I watched This is Us before bed. The episode where Randall questions whether William lied to him about his mother’s death. William saw her die, but she was revived after he ran away with Randall. Somehow, that made my mind wander …

Being a pediatrician in a pandemic

Jamie S. Hutton, MD

Physician

January 21, 2021

I have been a general pediatrician for over a decade. I chose pediatrics because I saw the children as our future. The only way to make the future bigger and brighter is to give them the best. So with all of my academic accolades through high school, college and medical school, I knowingly chose the lowest paying field in medicine. I love my patients, but a pandemic has …

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Being a pediatrician in a pandemic

There’s a doctor in the house, and maybe also a physician: a view from osteopathic medicine

Dan Skinner, PhD and Stevan Walkowski, DO

Physician

January 21, 2021

The Wall Street Journal’s decision to publish an attack on Dr. Jill Biden’s right to be called “doctor” has appropriately unleashed a firestorm. According to Joseph Epstein, the editorial’s author, Biden should drop the title because she isn’t what people often think of when they hear the word “doctor,” namely a physician. For Epstein, ‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to …

State sanctioned executions in the age of COVID-19

Kasey Johnson, DO

Health Policy

January 21, 2021

When the federal government executed Corey Johnson at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on the 14th of January, 2021, he was COVID-19 positive. He was executed while suffering from a highly contagious respiratory illness that is killing over 4,000 Americans each day. Despite his positive diagnosis for COVID-19 and his risk for infecting those around him with this respiratory illness, Corey Johnson’s execution was not postponed. Who …

How the vaccinated may become the next super-spreaders

Rushabh Doshi

Conditions and Diseases

January 21, 2021

With COVID-19 vaccines being administered to our front-line health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities, we are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel of this pandemic. Yet, given the time-limited nature of the vaccine’s development, we have yet to learn the extent to which vaccinated people can spread the virus. The COVID-19 vaccinations prevent disease, but we know little about if …

The hidden reason you struggle with your charts and what you can do about it

Gail Gazelle, MD

Physician

January 20, 2021

For most clinicians, this will sound familiar:

I can feel the resentment bubbling up as I sit down to chart on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. I’ve got dozens of charts hanging over me, and if I don’t get them closed, there will be yet another miserable head thrashing with my practice admin. My kids are clamoring for my time, and every fiber of my being is resisting getting these charts done. …

Who is the ideal patient?

Dr. Tedi Zeng

Physician

January 20, 2021

I once attended a business coaching workshop for health care professionals. For one of the exercises, we had to draw our “ideal patient.” The instructor told us to be as specific as we could. We were encouraged to set up a full name profile, age, gender, race, and health challenges. Some of us even wrote two-page background stories about how our ideal patients grew up and who they were dating. …

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Who is the ideal patient?

My Klonopin withdrawal story

Bethany Silverman

Medications

January 20, 2021

It was September 11, 2001. My dad had cheated on my mom again, the building that I worked in at that time had received an anonymous tip that we were a potential target for the terrorist attacks, and my mom, who needed a reprieve from my dad’s crap, was vacationing in Florida and was worried for me and my well-being. Plus, my dad was threatening to kill himself, and I …

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My Klonopin withdrawal story

A physician’s lonely New Year’s eve

Lindsay Ripley, MD

Physician

January 20, 2021

The roads are dark and empty at 6:15. Passing through downtown, animated reindeer “fly” through the air in lights on the side of a skyscraper. At the end of the truncated commute, I snag a spot on the second floor of the parking garage—typically rare but plentiful today. In the hospital’s lobby, I pass the 20-foot tree—topped with a massive star more like a spiky sea creature—that has been up …

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A physician’s lonely New Year’s eve

Training in psychiatry would give me the opportunity to understand suicide far better

Michael F. Myers, MD

Physician

January 20, 2021

An excerpt from Becoming a Doctors’ Doctor: A Memoir.

After about six months of my residency in internal medicine, I began to feel something was missing, though at the time I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then, after a series of general medicine rotations, I …

My Dragon versus my fingers: A weak dictator’s struggles in communication

Barbara Lazio, MD

Physician

January 19, 2021

“The nipples are equal and reactive” is a phrase I came across in the physical exam section of a note that I had dictated, courtesy of my Dragon. I have a Dragon. Not a cool Game of Thrones dragon, heroically swooping in at a critical moment, but a program that recognizes my voice and transcribes it into comically broken English in my patient’s medical record. At times, my Dragon has …

End medical school grades

Adam Lieber

Medical Education

January 19, 2021

There should be no grades in medical school. Forty-something percent of applicants get accepted to one or more medical schools. To even apply to medical school, one needs to have not only graduated or be on track to graduate college, but also needs to have passed the MCAT and have the support of a pre-medical application committee. I am no mathematician, but I do not think that it is a …

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End medical school grades

The lungs and the common good

Michael J. Stephen, MD

Physician

January 19, 2021

An excerpt from Breath Taking: The Power, Fragility, and Future of Our Extraordinary Lungs. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.

Eduardo Rosas Cruz was arrested late in the evening near Bakersfield, California, on July …

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The lungs and the common good