I’m not an organizational leader, a member of the C-suite, a department chair, or a VP of anything. I’m a coach who guides physicians as they try to provide exceptional care and actually have a life. But I know a lot about setting goals, executing on priorities, and inspiring through vision statements.
Here’s the thing. This is not a successful long-term strategy:
I am a first-generation Chinese American. And amidst the complexity of the pieces that form my identity (mom, wife, daughter, woman, doctor), it is the piece I have often prized the least.
In one of my earliest memories, I am riding a crowded bus in Beijing. My aunt and cousin are pointing out the American tourists as we pass, commenting on their high nose bridges and round eyes and how these …
Most physicians have been defendants in lawsuits. Plaintiff experts almost always have a feeding frenzy. In truth, expert witnesses are held to codes of conduct about remaining objective and avoiding partisanship or advocacy. Yet, should the verdict favor defendants, these experts, except for deserving the term “hired guns,” are rarely, if ever, held accountable for their feeding frenzy, which conflicts with their ethical obligations.
I want to share my experience. I independently …
Amidst beeping monitors, I sat holding my mother’s frail hand in mine with tears rolling down my face and an eerie silence within my soul. I was trying to make sense of the last 24 hours.
My mother had migrated to Houston after an early retirement at 55 to spend time with her granddaughter and me. But life had other plans, as she was diagnosed with breast cancer a year into …
Burnout among doctors is not something new. In fact, way before the pandemic, 69% of physicians reported they were somewhat or incredibly happy in 2020, before the pandemic started.
This number drastically fell to 49% when COVID-19 stepped in. This is a statistic that we need to be aware of.
For many of us, we embarked on our journey in medicine with naïve optimism. We stepped into medical school thinking about the …
How sad when a PCP calls, saying, “My chief warned me that if I don’t dramatically improve my productivity, I’m going to be terminated.” Such doctors are often patient-centered listeners who cannot bear to shift from healer mode to assembly line mode.
Some of these docs learn how to better balance healing with task completion; others make a beeline for concierge or direct primary care practices; still others …
The current era of health care delivery has been aptly compared with going to war against an invisible enemy that can attack anywhere, at any time and with novel means.
This invisible enemy was attacking the civilians as well as the “front line” with vigor.
We have attempted to learn on the fly and use our intelligence to develop a defensive strategy against the enemy’s ever-changing tactics and learn from prior battlefronts.
This …
“No offense to you, Doc, but I hate coming to the doctor.”
I hear these words at least once a week when I walk into a patient’s room.
In 15 years of practice, that means about a thousand times.
And that does not include my training years.
There will be variations of the theme, of course:
“I really don’t like coming to the doctor.”
I get anxious in the doctor’s office. That is why my blood …
This is not a story about the before. It is about the after.
When I blew the whistle on the gender harassment I experienced and witnessed within my workplace, I naively thought doing so would help. I thought opportunities and experiences for women would get better. I thought it would be worth the risk.
And yet, two years into the after, I am still struggling. My experience taught me that I am …
The landscape of medical practice has changed dramatically over the many decades I have been in practice. Most of these changes are intensely discouraging and depressing and are negatively affecting the physicians of today. The government, hospitals, networks, even our own professional organizations are working to establish and enforce new regulations — new hoops for doctors to jump through, mainly in the furtherance of their profit and their power over …
My friend (I’ll call him Dr. Mensch) reached out to me because he fears that a gender war is unfolding in his division. He is worried that current cultural concerns about gender equity are degrading the previously harmonious relations between male and female professionals on his team and that the mounting tension could have a negative impact on patient care.
Mensch told me that several female physicians, including residents and fellows, …
How is your ego serving you?
Medicine is a hierarchical entity. More so in surgery.
There is a linear line of command from the chief to the junior to the intern to the med student to the aspiring med student.
“Shit rolls downhill,” we said as interns while we powered through the 29th-hour on-call or the seven pending discharge summaries we had to finish, while a nurse was yelling or paging us 12 …
It sounds like a long time, but it really wasn’t. It was actually a very short period of time. My perspective of time changed with this number. I was close to my 9th birthday when my dad passed. He was only 48, and he had been diagnosed with lymphoma only a few years earlier. He passed after losing his battle to cancer. I remember saying my goodbyes in the hospital …
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When Elvis Presley rolled up his sleeve and received the polio vaccine backstage at The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, most Americans knew about it. At the time, the only stars hotter than rock ‘n’ roll itself were Presley, the genre’s de facto king, and Sullivan, the host who brought its biggest headliners to the American people.
By 1957, polio incidence dropped by 85 to 90 percent because …
High pitched alarms, low pitched beeps, the rhythmic inhale and exhale of the ventilator – those were the sounds in my emergency department one year ago. There were no kids running down the hall, no friends making light of their 50-something-year-old friend whose LeBron James delusions resulted in an ER visit and sutures, and no, not even worried family members.
Texas, like much of the country, was headed for …
Like most, our family decided that we had outgrown our current home a few years ago and wanted to move into a larger house that offered more square footage and land. It had been nearly twenty years since living in the house we have owned since the end of the residency, and the house-hunting effort seemed more bewildering and confusing than two decades ago. At the time, I was too …
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An excerpt from Act of Negligence. Copyright © 2021 by John Bishop. All rights reserved. Published by Mantid Press.
Beatrice Adams
Monday, May 15, 2000
“Morning, Mrs. Adams. I’m Dr. Brady.”
There was no response from the patient in Room 823 of University Hospital. She was crouched on the bed, in position to leap toward the end of the bed in the direction of …
In the last year, amidst COVID-19 news, animals have gained their place: cats harboring the virus, pet abandonment and, paradoxically, rising adoptions. Cats and dogs are now in the spotlight. I’m a physician, and my personal animal-related COVID-19 story changed the way I practice medicine.
During lockdown in 2020, we decided to adopt a kitten. As both animal abandonment and adoption were on the rise, we brought home a three-month-old orange …
With the COVID-19 pandemic inflicting havoc on everyone, there is no doubt that physicians and other health care workers are most affected. The looming fear for yourself and your family adds to the current burden of responsibilities you encounter and conquer every day.
When the pandemic started in 2020, the struggle was about finding a cure and controlling the spread of the virus. With the advent of vaccines in 2021, the …
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In the “Show-Me State” of Missouri, physicians receive their licenses from the Board of Registration for the Healing Arts. Seriously! This quaint term harkens back to a time when newly minted doctors had a relatively easy time realizing their desire to meld compassion, knowledge, and skill in order to relieve human suffering.
Armed with credentials suggesting that we have the right stuff to avoid doing harm, many of us are drawn …
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