Education

The unintended consequences of the night float rotation

Education

January 24, 2016

This past month has been a particularly difficult one for me because I’ve been on our float rotation. I have worked only night and swing shifts throughout our hospitals; this means my work hours are primarily from 8 p.m. to 10 a.m.

There are certainly other rotations during which I worked longer hours and had more emotionally draining conversations, but I have never felt as burned out as I have this …

Doctors grieve too: A lesson I did not learn in medical school

Lauren Gambill, MD

Education

January 14, 2016

“She is not yours to grieve.”

That statement, from another physician, hours after Ava died and as pent up tears rolled down my face, left me embarrassed and ashamed.

The message: She was my patient, not my child.

Never mind the amount of time and tenderness I had poured into her care during the month she spent in the pediatric ICU. I had no right to mourn her death. I am a doctor.

As …

This medical student went to rehab. Here’s what she learned.

Jennifer Adaeze Anyaegbunam

Education

January 9, 2016

As physicians, we are trained to look for change. We look for changes in lab findings and change medications, and we ask our patients, “what has changed since I saw you last?” We are always trying to get our patients to change in one way or another. Doctors are hardwired to seek changes that produce a dopamine release in our brains. We love it when patients see an improvement in …

From medicine intern to radiology resident: Is the grass greener?

Kerri Vincenti, MD

Education

January 8, 2016

When I was an intern in medicine, I couldn’t wait to start my role as a radiology resident. Even though I cared for my patients to the best of my ability and studied their diseases, I knew that my time in the department was limited. I wish I could say that I put my whole heart into my work, but with all of the extraneous demands of intern year — …

10 tips to make residency more enjoyable

Jessica Deslauriers, MD

Education

January 3, 2016

As a second year resident, I often do not feel like an expert in anything. Every day I learn more about medicine and realize how much more I still want to learn. In spite of the emotional, physical and mental challenges that being a young doctor entails, I have remained positive and have grown stronger throughout residency. As I reflect on the past year and a half, I appreciate the …

Misogyny in medicine is alive and well

Laura Faiver

Education

December 20, 2015

In 1978, my mother interviewed for dental school. On her post-interview tour of the school, her male tour guide assumed she was applying for dental hygiene school and showed her only those areas of the school. Upon my mother informing him that she was applying for dental school, he smirked and said, “Good luck getting in, you’re a woman,” and walked away laughing.

Of course in 1978, overt sexism was neither …

Read more…

Misogyny in medicine is alive and well

My first year as a nurse taught me what true resiliency is

Mandeep Garha, RN

Education

December 13, 2015

I remember attending an eight-hour seminar on my job, where experts educated new nurses about the transition we would experience in our profession. We learned about the change theory and the different levels of transition, from novice to expert. I remember not taking the two-day session very seriously, thinking that my accelerated three-year nursing degree had prepared me well for the workplace. Now that my one year of practicing as …

Medical students are depressed, but they’re taking the wrong drugs

Sebastian Hyman

Education

December 9, 2015

Studies have varied in their estimates of depression in medical school students, but they all show a similarly startling trend. Medical students have a higher depression rate than their non-medical counterparts. This culminates later in life with physicians with higher than average alcohol abuse problems and higher than average suicide rates, with male MDs 1.5 times as likely, and female MDs twice as likely to commit suicide than their Read more…

Medical students are depressed, but they’re taking the wrong drugs

Use the power of psychology to ace your medical school interview

Shirag Shemmassian, PhD

Education

December 4, 2015

Receiving medical school interview offers simultaneously provides relief, justifies the incredibly hard work you’ve put into your primary and secondary applications, and confirms that you are indeed cut out for medicine.

In other words, you’ve convinced them — at least on paper — that you will succeed in their program and make an excellent doctor.

So why do they even want to interview you?

Consider what schools can only learn about you in …

I got rejected from medical school twice. It was the best thing that happened to me.

Antonio Webb, MD

Education

November 28, 2015

Most people who apply to a graduate school and/or graduate medical programs apply to get accepted the first time of applying. No one wants to have to apply a second time and definitely not a third time. After a second rejection, a lot of people would probably recommended someone picking another field to enter or even giving up altogether. For me, both of my rejections were taken hard and still …

Is it time to take out your skeleton in the closet?

Dr. Henry Woo

Education

October 24, 2015

I have a skeleton in the closet. I really do. It is a human skeleton that I acquired when as a first-year medical student at the University of Sydney in 1981.

Back then, just about every medical student would own a half or full skeleton. They had to be real human bones as the quality of plastic models at that time were as good as useless as they often lacked many …

A medical student’s psychiatric hospitalization

Anonymous

Education

October 19, 2015

“You work here?!”

I nodded, a hint of a smile revealing my bemusement at his incredulity.

“Well … probably not after this.”

The other patients in the psych waiting area of the ER nodded in agreement. In my newly issued brown scrubs, stripped of my belongings, I was no longer a research coordinator at a top hospital, but rather one of them. And sadly, they believed being one of them meant you couldn’t …

Medical Jeopardy is a terrible way to learn. Here’s why.

Jennifer Middleton, MD

Education

September 28, 2015

Confession time: I despise presentations that involve the use of a PowerPoint Jeopardy! game. To be clear, I get uncomfortable when any game-like activity appears in a medical teaching presentation.

Not that I don’t think games can have an important role in education — far from it. Heck, I once worked on a presentation that turned our residency conference room into a giant Game of Life board with …

How anatomy lab changed this medical student forever

Anonymous

Education

September 13, 2015

I’m supposed to speak at the body donor memorial in September. I told the organizers my speech was written. “Don’t worry,” I assured them. “I have it all in my head, just need to get it down on paper. I’m a writer; it’s my process.” But the truth is that I am struggling with what to say. I’ve tried to write it, but I just end up drinking a pot …

The day I saw the humanity in medicine

Robert G. Dorfman

Education

September 13, 2015

At the heart of American medicine is the concept of bedside manner, and with it the concern that doctors are cold and unemotional. Indeed, doctors are exposed to disease and misfortune on a daily basis. A patient who presents with stage IV metastatic stomach cancer is just one of the many hundreds or thousands of such patients that will walk through the hospital doors in the coming years. Quotidian exposure …

Read more…

The day I saw the humanity in medicine

What causes toxic stress in medical school and how to fix it

Vamsi Aribindi, MD

Education

August 20, 2015

For two years, I served as a representative to my medical school’s student affairs committee. My job was to convey medical student concerns and problems. As part of that role, I had a lot of time to think about how and why many medical students experience depression and stress. Two recent articles have led me to write about the issue now: “10 simple solutions to stop medical student suicide,” …

This is why the humanities are important in medicine

Nasir Malim, MD, MPH

Education

August 12, 2015

As a medical student having completed my undergraduate major in the humanities, I often receive the question, “Why did you choose to do that?” The underlying thought behind asking why I would choose a major in the humanities while holding the intention to later attend medical school is that medicine is especially distinct from the humanities (and specifically African-American studies in my case). The sciences are just a whole other …

Superhero doctors are what we aspire to be

Ahmad Yousaf, MD

Education

August 3, 2015

shutterstock_84235930

We live in a time of great cynicism and skepticism. We seem to see only the mundane and boring in even the most interesting and spectacular things. The electrical rhythm of the heart that pulses through cardiac tissue and results in a coordinated muscle contraction that effectively ejects blood to the rest of the body for appropriate oxygen delivery is just … a …

Being an attending means being a teacher. Take that job seriously.

Neil B. Newman

Education

July 30, 2015

“Sometimes a simple, almost insignificant gesture on the part of a teacher can have a profound formative effect on the life of a student.”
– Paulo Freire

Think back to a moment when a teacher or “authority” figure gave you a compliment. We all have them, from kindergarten to high school to college and sometimes graduate school and work. The reason why many of you can recall such moments is that unlike …

Analyzing the deficit of African-Americans in academic medicine

Mary Branch, MD

Education

July 25, 2015

shutterstock_256955077

The number of African-American physicians in academic medicine is dismal, and this leads to an abundance of problems. Academic hospitals (teaching hospitals associated with universities) generally do not have a proportionate representation of underrepresented minority faculty as compared to the surrounding population. According to a U.S. News & World Report article, the number of African-American faculty increased by 0.2 percent in ten …

Education

Most Popular

Past Week

Past 6 Months

Recent Posts

Subscribe to KevinMD and never miss a story!

Most Popular

Past Week

Past 6 Months

Recent Posts