My residency baby just turned eighteen. Obviously, he isn’t really a baby anymore. He is six foot four and going to college, but somehow, I still think of him as that little baby. Maybe I’m just relieved that “we” both made it to eighteen. By “we,” I mean “me” as a physician mom and “him” as a person. I realize that sounds ridiculous, but honestly, being a physician mom is …
“Yeah, I mean, whatever, it’s a master’s! Have your own damn party.”
My jaw dropped in disgusted shock. The wall was thin, very thin. Come to think of it, it wasn’t even a wall. It was a partition: the separation of space between different office spaces. My mentor uttered these words: Assigned to support, encourage, and guide me through training; the person supposedly invested in my personal and professional growth. This …
Working in health care, going through medical school and residency, changes who you are. We invest so much of ourselves and our potential futures into accomplishing board certification. Once we achieve this feat, we often live in fear of one day losing what we have achieved. After all, many of us have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of dollars, relationships, friendships, marriages, the ability to have children, joys of life, our …
I had my very first surgery ever, just last year. Despite being cut upon, it was a remarkable experience, and the staff cracked jokes at my expense, even as I was going under. In the mood for some inappropriate medical humor? Well, perhaps not in this public forum; I’ll save it for gatherings less formal and where beer is plentiful. Suffice it to say, I survived and was treated well: …
I have always been a lover of words. Confusingly, I have found myself unable to define words that I would have easily been able to describe a decade ago. Due to a more weighty examination of cultural and social constructs, I am now left scratching my head thinking about how to define previously simple words like woman and mother.
When posed with the question, “When did you become a mother,” I …
Doctors who do not practice healthy behaviors and do not exercise are less likely to counsel their patients about improving health practices. Such omissions are a missed opportunity for more effective, safer, and less expensive care, in which patients become empowered to improve their own health.
Physician well-being is also central to the successful functioning of the entire health care system because to do well, you need to be well.
Yet, Read more…
Tuesday, at the podium in a small auditorium, I realized that my time was finally up. Even as an educator/administrator (non-clinical) physician, I was done. Preparing to give a canned talk — a requirement of my current career strategy — facing a group of anonymous medical students, the only thought going through my head was, “Why don’t we blow through these slides and get out of here?”
Normally, I relish public …
How ironic the way a young woman’s thoughts and attitudes change.
We spend so many years — decades, perhaps — preoccupied by controlling our cycles. For some, it is about cycle control.
For others, it is to avoid pregnancy because we are not yet ready or do not want to have a family. In those cases, most start some form of birth control, and for years we wait anxiously to bleed each …
The Great Resignation is producing tremendous challenges for physicians. In particular, many “senior” physicians (some as young as 50 years old) are simply throwing in the towel and resigning rather than continue with the brutal schedules imposed by many employers. As physicians leave, it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit new talent, so in many cases the remaining physicians are forced to take up the “slack.” That “slack,” of course, …
There has been a lot of increased focus on burnout in health workers over the past two years—with good reason. The added stress of a global health crisis to an inefficient system created a compounding effect on a pre-existing issue. This has led to soaring rates of burnout and increased the overwhelm, moral injury, trauma, and stress that clinicians were already facing.
The great resignation is at our doorstep as well. …
Visiting the doctor’s office can be a source of anxiety for millions of patients, who often fear unknown costs, an unexpected diagnosis, or exposure risk to diseases, like COVID-19.
On the other side of the equation, business stakeholders of a community-based primary care setting are struggling to exist within the confines of 20th-century technology and strategies. The Physicians Foundation estimates that 16,000 physician practices closed during the pandemic …
Here are the top 10 ways how and why doctors lie. See if you recognize any.
1. Doctors lie about work hours. When logging actual work hours exceeding the weekly “80-hour cap,” new docs are cited for duty-hour violations. Labeled as inefficient, overworked residents may be sent for a psych eval and prescribed stimulants to force compliance. “We were all taken into a room by the program director and told to …
Iconic singer Naomi Judd died at age 76, one day before she was to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Her daughters, Wynonna and Ashley Judd, shared a statement confirming her death: “Today [April 30, 2022] we sisters experienced a tragedy. We lost our beautiful mother to the disease of mental illness.” An exact cause of death was not disclosed, and no additional information was forthcoming. …
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If you asked the third-grade version of most doctors what they wanted to be when they grew up, I bet most would have said, “I want to be a doctor!” I doubt many would have said “hospital administrator” or “life coach.” Yet, according to a recent Medscape survey, nearly one-quarter of physicians are considering a shift to non-clinical careers. They are burned out and want to work …
I recently came across an article in the Journal of Urology that was trying to understand the determinants of patient satisfaction in the outpatient setting. They surveyed 500 patients over two months and asked questions about demographics, expectations regarding the time frame to obtain an appointment, appointment wait times, and the amount of time they expected to be spent with them, as well as expectations of being …
The doctor you are seeing may have already left medicine.
Yes, you still have an appointment.
Yes, they are still in the room, taking your history and performing a physical exam.
But inside their mind, they have already decided.
They haven’t said it out loud.
There’s been no official resignation letter.
But it’s a done deal.
It may be six months from now or ten or twenty-four.
It doesn’t matter because the decision has …
As a practicing ophthalmologist, I saw many patients who had developed blurred vision, glare, or trouble reading. These patients needed to understand that cataracts were the cause of their vision problems and how the cataracts developed and how they should be treated. I would begin the explanation by using a large, plastic eye model to show the lens’s position and how a clouded lens would affect vision. I would then …
“If I make a mistake, my patient could go home in a body bag.”
I don’t recall whom I first heard this from, but it stuck in my mind as terrifying thoughts do. And we wonder why burnout in medicine is a thing.
Mistakes in medicine can cause mortal consequences. They can harm another human being. We can’t escape this reality. We can’t undo it. We don’t get “three lives,” as in …
The levels of physician burnout which are a constellation of symptoms including feeling apathy, fatigue, depersonalization, and detachment are a group of feelings that have plagued health care.
But within the last two years, burnout has exploded to upwards of 65 percent in specialties like emergency, critical care, and infectious disease. It is not surprising, as these specialties have been on the frontlines of COVID care.
Why does this matter?
Because — we …
“Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation.”
-Merlin Sheldrake
Merlin Sheldrake invites us to see the world from the point of view of mycelium. He coaxes the reader to “[i]magine that [they] could pass through two doors at once. It’s inconceivable, yet fungi do it all the time. When faced with a forked path, fungal hyphae don’t have to choose one …
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