“I love the hours.”
“I want to be just like Dr. Smith. He has a sweet practice.”“I want to make a ton of money.”
“I want to make a ton of money.”
These are some bad reasons why medical students choose a specialty. Most medical students decide what specialty to pursue when they are in their mid to late 20s. While we all think …
The patient had arrived for a urology procedure with a blood glucose in the 400’s. He suffered from a recent stomach bug and had gotten off schedule with administration of his meds. While his GI symptoms had subsided, he was feeling crappy overall. I decided to cancel his case and went about initiating treatment to get his blood sugar under control. When I informed the urologist of my findings and …
After a week of medical school orientation, followed by two weeks in the classroom studying cellular organelles and biochemical pathways, our class was finally going to start the centuries-old rite of passage that is human gross anatomy. For many students, it will be first time seeing a dead body. The anatomy lab is where future surgeons will make their first cut with a scalpel, without the pressure of life and …
Viewpoint #1. Training programs might say: we are headed for a major league collision in the training of women physicians. Soon 50% of all trainees will be women, and in some specialties, such as OB/GYN, they will be 80-90% of the residents in any particular program. Training years coincide with prime child bearing years. Imagine if even only half the residents in a program were pregnant at once. What would happen …
“Dr. Fisher, can you teach our residents EKG lecture series?”
Naively, I said “Sure!”
What I didn’t realize is how hard this is to do today.
Much of this is not residents’ fault. They only have so many hours in so many days to attend lectures while caring for patients. Thanks to residency work-hour restrictions, those hours have become even fewer. To make matters much worse, through the year residents are torn to …
Whether you’re starting medical school or beginning your second year, this post is for you. Will probably work just as well for PAs, NPs and any other health professional student who hasn’t started clinical rotations.
Our former babysitter just graduated from medical school and the WhiteCoats are just as proud as her parents are. Then I started thinking, what advice would I give to students starting medical school?
Our first day of …
Across the country, newly minted doctors have started their internships. The first night on call there won’t be an intern – anywhere in the country – who will sleep. Every new intern is absolutely convinced that the beeper is going to go off and they won’t know what to do. (You get over this by about the 2nd or 3rd call night, by the way).
Graduating from medical school …
One of the most intense moments of my third-year of medical school was during my internal medicine clerkship when a code blue was called.
It was our responsibility as medical students on the inpatient service to report to every code blue while we were on our calls every 4th night. This time was no different, and my call partner and I ran to the code. When we arrived, I recognized the …
“What about combined psychiatry-family medicine-neurology-internal medicine programs? Should I try to do a triple board program in psychiatry-child psychiatry and pediatrics?”
Every April, I field such questions from a slew of rising fourth year students who have become, to their surprise (and sometimes dismay), passionately interested in psychiatry. Psychiatry is a shortage specialty and psychiatric issues rank high among the challenges facing medical care systems here and around the world. For …
I recently learned the sorry news that my childhood pediatrician has died. Not only was he my pediatrician, but he was also my father’s pediatrician. Our family became rather close to him over the years.
He came from a different generation of doctors, one that made house calls, that served in wars abroad, and that learned how to diagnose patients in the days before MRIs and CT scans. Even though I …
“Um—Hi there, I’m a, uh, you know. Medical student. First year. For, you know, the Patient-Doctor—err, Patient-Physician course—”
The nurse smiled and turned to a woman of shorter stature with bony, scrunched- up shoulders. “Mary, do you want this first year to interview you?”
Mary was about to set foot in the lounge when she heard this. She let out a sigh and faced me. Her eyes looked worn; I could tell …
I have been thinking a lot over the last few weeks about all the many ways that the experience of medical school has changed me.
The most obvious is knowledge. I’ve drunk from the proverbial “firehose” of information that we experience in medical school, and apparently enough of the facts stuck with me to pass all my exams, and secure myself a residency program back in my home state of California. …
The lines of text on my laptop screen blurred together as I lost focus. I knew there was at least one error on my medical school re-application I would regret later on. My eyes scanned the familiar body of words but failed to connect the information to my brain. Frustrated, I closed the application and shut my computer off.
My bedroom door abruptly swung open, revealing my mother with the phone …
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The more I talk to new physicians who are transitioning into practice, the more I realize how many substantial life and career shifts occur post-residency.
I experienced these changes myself several years ago, but it’s taken me a while to fully process them and realize how they’ve affected my life.
In fact, it would be safe to say that I experienced a complete 180 after graduating from residency. I know other new …
Some people critique Continuing Medical Education (CME) programs as spoon-feeding. As a young physician struggling to learn a lot of material, I actually appreciate a bit of ready-to-consume content that I can learn quickly and effectively. The American College of Cardiology (ACC) and other reputable institutions provide CME programs that, overall, help to keep physicians up on the literature and integrate new findings with existing knowledge. However, despite the basic …
If you are a second-year medical student, there is one thing on your mind at this time of year: Step 1. Although scary, there are things that you can do to help calm your anxiety and get your best score.
Set a goal
In my opinion, before you start really preparing for Step 1, you should have two things clearly in mind: where you are with your score and where you want …
I eyed my chat screen with a good amount of suspicion. A friend of a friend who I had rarely spoken to had initiated a chat conversation with me with the opening line “How are medical school apps going?” The cursor blinked in anticipation.
I began to think about possible ulterior motives that she, another pre-medical student, could have had. Perhaps she just wanted to use me as a comparison for …
Looking back on the first three years of medical school, it’s hard to imagine living through the endless days of studying again. Weekends were spent cooped up in the library and there were countless holidays that I wasn’t able to spend with my family. Instead, they were spent memorizing indecent aspects of the human anatomy and performing DREs on strangers. There are better ways to get to know a person …
After undergrad, and before starting medical school, I worked for two years as scribe in the emergency department. I followed emergency physicians and completed their charts as they saw patients. I would also remind the physicians of various tasks to complete, alert them of abnormal lab values and pull up x-rays to be interpreted.
One of the reasons I wanted the job was to gain experience in medicine, first as a …
I never realized before how much work goes on behind the scenes to prepare and conduct these interview days, but I sure do now. As a Chief Resident, I schedule residents to attend the applicant dinners, lunches, and tours, and to spend time with the applicants our lounge. This makes the actual interview days go by much smoother, because two of us are present at all times to speak to applicants and answer any …
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