Anyone with even the slightest passing interest in health care, has heard the mind-blowing statistics. As a nation, we spend almost 3.5 trillion dollars on health care. To put that into perspective, that is more than the total GDP of every country in the world apart from China and Japan! Germany, next on the list, has an entire GDP of 3.4 trillion dollars. At 18 percent of the economy, we …
3 ways to fix end-of-life care
I was born in Shanghai, China. In September 2000, my parents and I left behind our family and friends, a language and culture dear to our hearts and social and financial stability to immigrate to the United States. I was six at the time. Although I don’t claim to have fully understood the weight of their decision to start a new life, I knew that my parents were making a …
How being an immigrant shaped the way I treat patients
The only time my husband outearned me was during our first three years of marriage when I was still in residency and working 80-plus hours per week earning less than minimum wage per hour. Since then, despite graduating in a professional degree, we have made relocation moves that primarily help with my career growth, to the detriment of his.
In 2015, an NPR article quoted statistics showing that 38 percent of …
Make more than your spouse? Here’s how to save money on taxes.
Days are getting shorter and evenings are getting cooler in temperate regions in the Northern hemisphere. This also means that the flu season will be around the corner soon. Most people group influenza (flu) and cold together and refer to the “cold and flu season” as the time of the year when we expect to come down with a “flu bug” and consider it “normal” or customary. Some are even …
This is the deadly virus you need to look out for
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s view, there are few.”
Shunryu Suzuki was writing about Zen beginners and masters, but this concept applies to the practice of medicine as well. Experienced physicians are slow to accept a new paradigm, while medical students and new physicians are more open.
Sometimes, what we “know” to be true is not. Despite clinical trials to the …
Do medical experts really know best?
“In Puerto Rico, we call those plants morir vivir,” said a patient who sat by the side of the road while we checked her blood sugar. When I reached to touch the small fern, it swiftly closed its leaves shut, and then after a few minutes cautiously reopened. As a young doctor I was fascinated with the poetry of the name. “It’s just like us Puerto Ricans,” she smiled.
For two …
An emergency physician travels to Puerto Rico. Here’s what she saw.
I hear many comments and genuine inquiries about being a physician in a prison. They’re all well-meaning yet hint at how little is known about this world on the “inside” and those who inhabit it.
I take my time answering questions about the complexities of practicing behind bars, yet also highlight that despite the challenges, it’s difficult to see myself working anywhere else.
The “why” is tough to answer. I’m not a …
What it’s like to practice medicine behind bars
On September 30th of this year, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) ran out of federal funding. While CHIP has not received as much publicity as the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it has had a major impact on the American population: providing health insurance for 9 million children who would otherwise not be insured. Despite its success, there is currently a debate about the funding of CHIP.
CHIP, which was passed …
There shouldn’t be a debate about funding CHIP
The holiday season is stressful enough without having to try to fit a visit to the emergency department (ED) in your schedule. Getting medical care on a major holiday can be especially difficult because most, if not all, offices and urgent cares are closed. This can make the ED wait longest around the holidays. Here are some tips to keep you out of the ED this holiday season.
1. Make sure …
How to stay out of the ER this holiday season: advice from an emergency medicine doctor
The truth about change in health care was never more perfectly captured than in an episode of Sex and the City, when Carrie Bradshaw lamented that we keep “should-ing all over ourselves.”
In the past decade, those of us on the front lines of health care have seen the passage of nine major pieces of federal legislation that, combined, have profoundly affected how they work. We’ve seen the number of people …
5 shifts to move health care in the right direction
Baseball, like medicine, is deeply imbued with a sense of tradition, and no team more so than the New York Yankees, disdainful of innovations like placing players’ names on the backs of their jerseys and resistant to eroding strict standards related to haircuts and beards.
It’s why doctors and patients alike should pay special attention to why the Yankees parted ways with their old manager and what they now seek instead. In …
What baseball can teach doctors
I distinctly remember the excitement I felt during my first year of medical school when exposed to the breadth of general and specialty fields that seemed all so equally rewarding and medically influential. I envisioned myself holistically understanding my patient, seeing the problem in the context of her other medical issues, her personality, her family and her environment — an approach I considered at the heart of the oath we …
How to inspire medical students to pursue primary care
There were fewer black men enrolling in medical school in 2014 than in 1978.
In a world where the first black president of the United States was elected nearly a decade ago with many declaring it to be a new day of progress for blacks in America, statistics such as this one come as a surprise. Fifteen years ago only 677,000 blacks held an advanced degree. Today that number is 1.6 …
Recognize the many accomplishments of black men in medicine: #BlackMenInMedicine
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Having been surgically trained and surgically-minded, I’ve had expression ingrained in my psyche such as “a chance to cut is a chance to cure,” “when in doubt, cut it out” and “nothing can heal like cold, hard steel.” Indeed, as a surgeon, I see patients in my office and in the hospital with the specific question of whether or not surgery is indicated, what type of surgery and how urgently …
Sometimes not doing surgery makes you a better surgeon
There are highs and lows in doing any job and throughout one’s career. The highs, and the possibility of highs, can often overpower the effect that the low moments have on well-being and professional satisfaction.
The health care context is no different. But unlike most professions, physicians, nurses and other health care workers are exposed to a higher frequency of distress, pain, suffering, death and trauma and all the accumulated personal …
Health care professionals need balance
There she was — compassion. It had been so long since I had caught sight of her, I wasn’t sure at first if I recognized her. Had she had changed so much over the years or had I? She was peeking around the corner checking in to see how I was doing. I am surprised she still visits me, after the way I treated her all those years ago. If …
Compassion and empathy can solve so many of the pains that arrive in the office
Four o’clock on a Friday afternoon is an anxiety-inducing time to be running behind in clinic as patients and staff both begin to show signs of wanting to leave. After finishing with a particularly complicated case involving chronic pain with multiple spinal and abdominal surgeries, I rushed into the room of the patient scheduled for 3 p.m. frazzled. The patient was an elderly man, seated with arms folded, looking sternly …
We must ask patients obvious questions
Trump recently declared a national public health emergency. In this statement he was not talking about HIV or hepatitis C nor was he referring to the increased incidence of gun violence in the country. The president’s statements focused on a very different public health problem; he was talking about America’s high incidence of opioid-related deaths mostly from overdose.
This declaration has been met with various pronouncements including …
Here’s how to win the opioid war
According to Hesiod’s version of an ancient Greek legend, because Pandora has opened a jar stuffed full of evil by the Olympian gods, “countless plagues, wander amongst men … earth is full of evils … Diseases come upon men continually by day and by night, bringing mischief to mortals silently.” Curiously that jar was closed before hope was also allowed to escape.
Is the legend an expression of how bleak the …
Is there danger in hoping too much?
In an article published by the Atlantic earlier this year, Ryan Park writes that neither truck drivers nor bankers work the kind of gruelingly long hours that doctors — particularly young doctors in their residency programs — do. It is no secret that residency life is demanding and exhausting. Over the last decade, it has also become controversial. Almost a test in itself, as if gauging doctors’ …
The hidden threat of the 80-hour resident workweek
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