When asked to describe my career, I consider myself primarily a clinician educator. Recently I have reflected on the influences that allowed me to have a successful career doing what I love. This post is not meant to mention all those influencers, but just some that I recall often. As I have thought about this post, I quickly realized that all the “heroes” that I recall focused on clinical education. …
An ode to great clinician-educators
College → medical school → residency → fellowship. The journey to becoming a doctor sometimes feels like climbing a never-ending ladder. The process started for me as an undergraduate when I was seventeen years old and will go on well into my thirties. I am still climbing. Each level of ascension is drastically different in both your skill set and responsibilities to your patients. The variation from one stage to …
Being a specialist is a constant climb. But it’s worth it.
Our powerful subconscious minds are processing information that we don’t even realize we are taking in, so to achieve gender equity we must actively uncover things that are unintentionally promoting stereotypes.
For example, we know that if we want to promote a gender equitable environment that putting portraits of men on the walls of the classrooms would not be ideal. Even if there were one or two women in the mix, …
Do the portraits hanging in medical schools hurt women and minorities?
On TV shows, therapists decorate their rooms with leather lounge chairs, throw pillows and organza curtains that let in the light.
But Dr. Hassan’s office is in the clinic basement. The fluorescent lighting is sterile. She has a gray metal desk — I think every doctor I’ve shadowed as a medical student has had that same desk.
But I’m not here as a student.
I’ve been anticipating this appointment for a month. In …
The news that the Department of Justice is supporting a case against affirmative action at Harvard has led me to reflect on my 38 years of experience in admissions at a New York medical school.
When I started out in the late seventies, affirmative action legislation had already been in place for a decade. One of its goals …
A dean of admissions on affirmative action in medical school
Whether we are aware of it or just letting it happen in the background, every day we are teachers, and we are learners. In the realm of academic medicine, the roles and relationships are obvious. Attendings teach residents, residents teach medical students. Medical students teach each other, and to a great degree, they must teach themselves. Regardless of our chosen field of medicine, our patients depend on us daily for …
Listen to your medical students and individualize their lessons
Traditionally, many medical students use the proverbial “last summer of their lives” to conduct basic/clinical research, shadow or go abroad. If you want to be a leader in health care or are simply unsure of what to do over the summer, you should try something more exotic and unexpected — work in finance or industry.
Wall Street, big pharma and private insurers have long been the moral punching bags of clinicians …
Want to change medicine? Work in finance.
I’m three weeks into my second year of medical school, and my classmates and I are sharing feelings of being “old” compared to the first years on campus, who are “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” — not yet jaded by med school bureaucracy, and (rightfully) excited by all the opportunities that lie ahead of them. I’ve also heard a few of them use an often-judgmental term that has always confused me: “gunner.”
Some …
In medical school, not all gunners are created equal
Although my medical school created many opportunities for clinical exposure during the first two years, none of it compared to the immersive experiences that were to follow. Textbooks, PowerPoints, and lectures galore were supplanted by hundreds of patient interactions in my rotation months. Here are four patient communication tips that have served me well, and that I wish I knew from the outset of my rotations.
1. Build rapport with the …
4 tips for better communication with patients
A surgical resident is suing St. Louis University, its surgical residency program director, and its trauma service chief for what she claims is an unjustified decision requiring her to repeat her fourth year of training.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch article about this has a link to a 42-page PDF describing the details of the suit. Because I suspect you won’t read that PDF and maybe not even the article, I …
A surgical resident is held back a year. Finding out who’s right will be difficult.
As I approach the end of my medical school training, I want to take a moment to reflect upon the invaluable education that my classmates — novices in medicine but rich in life experiences — have provided.
Nearly all of us identified with the common struggle of medical school: late night study sessions, difficult days, and the general balancing act of focusing on work as well as our own wellness. All …
Advancing physician diversity and representation
It’s that time of year again, the dreaded, yet exciting, residency application season. Year after year, we have learned that securing a residency position extends beyond competitive scores. It involves planning, networking and putting your best foot forward to prove you are the perfect “match” for a program. To avoid having shock and stress of an unexpected scramble, we wanted to share five tips, which extend beyond some of the …
6 tips for medical students to get the perfect match
“Someone call for a body bag.”
These were words that I didn’t expect to hear on my final day of burn surgery at large metropolitan hospital. We had just planned on a routine burn excision and skin grafting. Our patient, Faith, was a seven-year-old girl with third-degree burns to 85 percent of her body from a house fire. We had been caring for her in the ICU for the past three …
Caring for your own wounds: Lessons from the burn unit
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That first paycheck as a new attending means so much more than what is direct-deposited into the bank account. The emotions of finishing medical school and training to finally seeing the fruits of your labor positively affect the bank account is something to be proud of. As a medical student (like myself) and resident, it is the light at the end of the tunnel. You’re probably asking yourself, “Why should …
The key to financial freedom: Live and work like a resident
When Hurricane Harvey swept through Texas, devastating millions of people, I was lucky to be in an area of Houston where the flooding did nothing more than confine me to my apartment for a few days. It hurt to see so many people suffering after reading the news and social media posts about people losing their homes, many of their belongings, and in some cases, their lives. As the flooding …
How Hurricane Harvey changed this medical student
Despite what the textbooks say or how much research is devoted to substance use disorder, I still meet people who feel that addiction is a “choice,” and that these patients don’t need “treatment” (you made your bed, and now you can just lay in it).
To a certain degree, this is true. Like Little Debbie cakes and type 2 diabetes, cigarettes and lung cancer, lack of exercise and essential hypertension, addiction …
Addiction doesn’t just ruin the addict’s life
Last week, I spent a few hours completing an online module for one of my immunology courses. The purpose of this module was simply to expose students to the format of lecturing and assessments that would take place throughout the length of this course.
The portion of the module that I found really exciting was a series of videos depicting scenes at a local clinic where a physician examined a patient …
Pursuing a career as a physician: A reminder why
“Apocalyptic” was the word used by my fellow volunteers at the local church, a temporary shelter for displaced families on post-hurricane-landfall day 3. Although the flooded roads harboring similarly displaced alligators, fire ants, and snakes and the black flecks in the sky representing rescue helicopters were grossly removed from the many-eyed beasts of Revelations, I agreed with their assessment. In fact, the thousands of flooding victims stranded on roofs in …
What Hurricane Harvey taught this medical student about patient care
Just a year after the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to race-conscious admissions in Fisher v. University of Texas, this issue is being pushed back to the front of the room by none other than the Trump administration’s Justice Department hauling out hoary tropes about “reverse discrimination.” They are preparing cases against Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, charging to the rescue of the multitudes of …
Let’s not be petty about affirmative action in medical school
I was inspired a couple of weeks ago. Sitting at the WeWork facility in Northern Liberties, Philadelphia. I looked at the group of entrepreneurs, creatives and innovative thinkers sitting in front of me. What were we doing you might ask? Collaborating to help one another build our dreams. This is the epitome of the human experience.
One of the topics that came up in conversation was the difference between a man …
Are doctors more like humans, animals or robots?
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