I’ve finally figured out why we – physicians – are called “providers.” It’s not merely because we render services. In addition, our role has become a commodity, genericized and stripped of autonomy. We are no longer free to practice as we wish. We have lost the ability to take medical matters into our own hands, to control them, and to resolve them ourselves. Having lost ownership of medical practice to …
We must protest our moral outrage
“Become the doctor your parents always wanted you to marry,” said the T-shirt I purchased from the women in medicine interest group during my first year of medical school. I remember feeling like I should buy that T-shirt (and I did), yet it was also something I was never quite comfortable wearing. It was a “women’s cut” (how appropriate), which meant it fit snugly across the chest and sat high …
Navigating feminism in medicine
The role of a physician is not only to diagnose and treat physical ailments but also to provide emotional support to patients. Understanding and managing emotions is a crucial skill for physicians, impacting their ability to provide empathetic and effective care. Moreover, emotional intelligence also affects a physician’s well-being and relationships in their personal life. In this article, we will explore the eight primary emotions identified by psychologist Robert Plutchik …
The emotional intelligence of physicians: Understanding and managing emotions for better care
In line with my previous posts that explain how to resolve all medical malpractice lawsuits, especially frivolous ones, at the lowest possible cost for the physician and the malpractice carrier, this article addresses a malicious medical malpractice lawsuit. Malicious lawsuits deserve something more. Not only are they all frivolous, but they should exact a cost from those who seek to profit from them.
The forewarning
On June 19, 2018, a patient …
Navigating a malicious medical malpractice lawsuit: a case study
My heart goes out to the doctors who write about the unbearable burdens of doctoring in a corporate setting, feeling driven to see more patients than they want to within the span of an 8-hour clinic day. They’re tasked with dividing their time into shorter and shorter clinic visits, devoting more time to inputting data points into the EMR rather than engaging in meaningful patient conversations.
I have experienced both ends …
The sacred profession of doctoring
Where do you start to update a system so deeply mired in antiquated technology and a culture so resistant to change?
Here’s where:
Health records requests. Why should I have to request my own medical records? When I do make a request, why does it take days to get them? Why do I have to physically pick them up? Why do I get a stack of papers, or, if I’m lucky, a CD? …
Revamping health care: Tackling outdated systems and shifting mindsets
Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury and I attended Los Angeles High School, separated by 15 years. He once spoke there and quelled the rumor that he failed English: “I got a C!”
His writings extend beyond the realm of reality into a dimension of creativity and hope. Oftentimes, we think mankind has reached the limits of understanding, but in reality, there are things we don’t know regarding the eternity of outer …
The fusion of fMRI and polygraph tech
I am writing to vehemently argue against out-of-office infusions for my patients. There are many general reasons for this, which I will enumerate. There are also often patient-specific reasons, such as frailty, chronic noncompliance with recommendations (which do not reach the level of a psychiatric issue but which make offsite infusions less safe), and patient-perceived intolerance of infusions (even if we see no objective signs of a reaction). While these …
A physician’s letter: Safeguarding patient well-being by opposing off-site infusions
After nearly a year of planning my exit strategy, my final day as a hospital-employed physician was June 30th, 2023. How surreal to finally be independent! In a recent phone call, a dear friend and fellow physician asked what drove me to my decision.
“Because I felt like a failure every day,” I disclosed to my normally sympathetic colleague. To my dismay, he responded with a chuckle. I asked why he …
Leaving hospital employment: a physician’s pursuit of independence
As I clicked onto the homepage of Amazon Clinic, I got a little bit nervous. Low up-front costs, straight-forward medical decision-making, bread and butter medicine at the patient’s fingertips. Have a UTI? As long as it is simple, no problem, here’s your antibiotic. Just a few clicks. Male pattern baldness? Click. Erectile dysfunction? Click.
Just barebones medicine without the pesky face-to-face human interaction. And with easy-to-follow “guidelines,” we don’t even need …
Primary care challenges: AI and virtual clinics
As I sit here contemplating the beginning of this unsent letter, I find myself questioning its intended recipient and purpose. The truth is, I don’t have the answers just yet. Perhaps, by the end of these few paragraphs, some clarity will emerge.
When I left my home country to come to the United States, I envisioned hospitals here as being on par with what we would consider “first-world country” institutions. I …
Navigating the broken medical system: challenges faced by foreign medical graduates
If you are a practicing physician, then you have definitely come across patients who want something that you feel is unnecessary. Sometimes those conversations escalate and become contentious, and sometimes you reluctantly give the patient what they request even though you know it’s not “best practice.” These demands and interactions can weigh on us and leave us emotionally drained.
In the pediatrics office, that can look like this:
Navigating patient requests: Balancing care and communication
As human needs continue to evolve, it is essential for our systems to adapt accordingly. One perplexing question is who bears the cost of human work. Do the systems pay for human labor, or do humans contribute to the systems, which, in turn, pay for their work? From an economic perspective, it boils down to humans paying for humans to work through human-devised systems. We won’t delve into the idea …
Ensuring compensation during absences
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The path to becoming a dermatologist has become increasingly challenging in recent years. This is due, in part, to the competitive environment of residency applications, as well as the increasing emphasis on research output. In their publication, “Research Fever—An Ever More Prominent Trend in the Residency Match,” Dr. Ahmed and Dr. Adashi note that the number of research publications on residency applications has increased significantly over the past decade. This …
Navigating the rising challenges of dermatology residency applications
Burnout isn’t our fault. However, since we can’t change the inner workings of large institutions all at once, if at all, how do we push through? How do we do more than just survive?
“More and more doctors are coming to believe that the pandemic merely worsened the strain on a health care system that was already failing because it prioritizes profits over patient care,” wrote Eyal Press in the New …
Resisting burnout in health care: Empowering inner practices
The cure for ailing health care lies in returning to ethical traditions, prioritizing patient care over profits, holding physicians accountable, and reforming existing oversight bodies and professional organizations. The ailing health care is curable. To be made whole again, it requires obvious but drastic steps. The crux of the problem is that medicine largely abandoned its own traditions and time-tested modus operandi in favor of the seemingly efficient and shiny …
Curing ailing health care: Embracing ethical traditions and prioritizing patient care
An excerpt from Our Hospital.
Kush Kare Hospital in Columbia, New York, was the flagship of Kush Kare Private Equity Inc., a for-profit chain of hospitals across America. A for-profit that was listed on a lot of lucrative trading routes. Clearly its workings were murky—maybe not equity at all. A clever …
Battling COVID chaos and recruiting doctors
I’m so sorry, but the pain was too much, and I couldn’t continue. I have witnessed patients crying themselves to sleep while nurses held their hands, praying for their treatments to be approved, giving them one more chance at life. Nurses try to juggle 8, 9, 10, or more patients during their shifts, holding onto their compassion with the last thread of hope that things will improve. Yet, they’ve also …
In the trenches of health care: Facing unbearable strain
It has been only two weeks since I realized the job I had was gone. As physicians, I think we have this idea of what our work will look like into the future. It is enshrined in pomp and circumstance from the start as we take an oath to “do no harm,” it’s encrusted with an unspoken culture of medicine that often asks us to give more than we thought …
When death comes to your job: Grieving what was and moving on
Many physicians reading this forum treat pain and addiction and may wonder what criteria the DEA believes to be indicative of a pill mill. The following is from a motion filed in federal court regarding the prosecution of a physician:
The government claimed in the motion that pill mills, “have been found to have common characteristics, including some or all of the following”:
DEA’s criteria for identifying pill mills: a physician’s analysis
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