I’m saddened to hear of the passing of Stephen “Twitch” Boss. He was a talented DJ and dancer who brought joy to many with his infectious personality and smile. He will be remembered for his incredible talent and the joy he brought to those around him. He leaves behind his wife and three children.
The truth is that psychiatry is a challenging …
Remembering Twitch: a star who shone bright
I screen patients for skin cancer on a regular basis, and one of my research interests is to find new biomarkers of cancer prognosis – to be able to separate out cancers that won’t actually do someone any harm versus cancers that could very well spread, grow unchecked and uncontrolled, and potentially end a life. I know that cancer treatments have advanced beyond my imagination in recent years, with …
Sweet bitter: a doctor’s cancer diagnosis
When I married my husband, I had no idea there would be a mistress one day.
When I met the man who would become my husband, he was not yet a doctor. He was 22, a black belt, a waiter in a fancy restaurant, and very handsome. He knew all kinds of things about champagne and paté, cocktails, and sushi.
We met in our college martial arts club. I was 19 and …
Employers need lawyers. This doesn’t just apply in medicine — it’s true everywhere. For a recent high-profile example, let’s consider Twitter. If massive layoffs had been made without adequate notice as required by California law, they could be on the hook for millions of dollars in damages.
However, medicine likes to consider itself as different from other businesses. It’s a nice idea, this fantasy of the country doctor who delivers babies …
Don’t be like Elon Musk. Get a lawyer for your clinic.
It does not behoove us to mince words in a politically charged climate. To productively discuss any controversial topic, we must first define terms and get past the jargon and doublespeak that commonly muddles conversations on serious issues. The Oxford Dictionary defines euphemism as “a mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing.” We often use euphemisms …
Drop the euphemisms and get uncomfortable when talking about abortion
There is no one prototypical physician. Every physician has their own practice style, their own knowledge base, and their own preferred method of communication. In my role as medical director for case management at my community hospital, I was given 30 minutes during new nursing orientation to provide nurses tips when communicating with doctors.
I put together this list of things that physicians wished hospital nurses knew about them, both good …
Physician secrets that nurses need to know
Every doctor wants to be perfect. We want to make sure our diagnosis is perfect. Our treatment plan is perfect, and our outcome will be perfect. Patients want the perfect doctor. They want us to get it right on the first try, each and every time. The problem is perfectionism, as hard as we try to achieve it or wish for it, is not attainable. Perfectionism will kill you.
There has been a lot of talk about physician burnout over the past few years, and as an occupational medicine physician, I’m happy to see that conversation is taking place. For too long, we just saw burnout as an acceptable hazard that just comes with the job.
But it’s become clear to me that there’s a big missing piece in the discussion of burnout — particularly when we try to answer …
How female social conditioning leads to burnout
I read KevinMD regularly. I see a lot of stories about how broken medicine is: how doctors are retiring, leaving early because they are overworked or underappreciated, or being manipulated by corporate medicine. All these complaints are valid. There are also articles about how residency is brutal and causes mental distress to trainees, with the onerous hours and unrealistic expectations. That, too, is true. Medical training, at least in my experience, is …
I love listening to podcasts on my way to work, and I was most excited when the second season of Dr. Death started. If you didn’t listen to the first season, it was about Dr. C. Duntsch, a neurosurgeon in the Dallas area who should never have been operating on people. He even left his best friend paralyzed from the neck down due to a botched surgery.
The second season follows …
I am a female cardiologist that graduated from medical school almost 20 years ago. Although my core personality has remained constant, I have been viewed through multiple different optics. What I find most interesting is that while most of my patients would unanimously agree that I am a smart, talented, and dedicated professional, I have never achieved this level of validation from other professionals in medicine.
I stay the same, but …
The duality of being a female physician
For many of us, while in medical school and residency, sexual health history was mostly taught from a disease standpoint. If a patient had a complaint about sexual dysfunction, had a symptom or concern about a sexually transmitted infection, needed contraception, or had specific questions related to the reproductive system, then we took a sexual history. Sexual health history taking in many programs is limited to an elective in the …
Sexual health is health: It’s time to embrace that in medicine
The Boston Globe recently published an article on Dr. Jane Weeks, an oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who declined treatment for breast cancer, passed out at work due to a pulmonary embolism in 2012, and ultimately died of breast cancer in 2013. I was a first-year fellow training at Dana-Farber in 2012 and vividly recall hearing that a well-known oncologist had passed out in the cafeteria. There were many …
Gender bias is powerful and harmful
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I’ve been in the health care industry for over a decade. Starting a few years ago, I embarked on a new project: building a case scheduling platform specifically for anesthesia staff.
I’ll be the first to say that I never envisioned myself becoming a so-called “health care entrepreneur.” From my perspective, I’m just an anesthesiologist who stumbled upon an unaddressed pain point—the tedious process of building OR case schedules—and after looking …
Does your OR case scheduling process need a revamp?
To: [Group: all employees]
From: Office of the CEO
Subject: A fork in the road
Going forward, we will need to be extremely hardcore to streamline a restructured Health care 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly diseased world. This will mean working even longer hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will justify a new N95 mask each week.
Health care will also be much more profit-driven. Physicians and nurses will still be very …
If the hospital CEO emailed employees like Twitter’s CEO
[Frivolous: not having any serious purpose or value]
For years, I’ve noticed something that’s bothered me. I see it almost daily within social media women’s physician groups. The post starts with, “I know this is a frivolous question, but …” What follows are questions about topics ranging from cosmetic recommendations to travel advice.
Questions like:
“Where can I find concert tickets?”
“What color should I paint my bedroom?”
What do you all think of this …
You’re not being frivolous. You’re being fabulously human.
The fall sunlight calls my eye to notice little things: the veins on a yellowing maple leaf. The askew feather on a chicken’s wing. The faintest breeze tricking the pond into patterned sin waves around a lone white duck.
What do we owe this world but our ability to parse and observe, to interpret, to be filled enough by moments of abject beauty to return to the ugliness and try to …
Aesthetics and the physician’s eye
I’m a hand surgeon. After six years of academic practice, I opted out of the public and universal health care system my country is famous for to create the first private hand surgery practice in Montreal, Canada. That was 12 years ago.
Opting out of the system means that I do not get any payment or reimbursement from the government in a country where private insurance does not pay for private …
7 things I’ve learned after 12 years of private relationship-based direct care in Canada
When I started my company in 2009, personal experience was a driving force in identifying the problem I wanted to help solve. As a neurosurgeon, I often treated patients who were neurologically devastated by acute bleeding in the brain after years’ worth of poorly controlled high blood pressure. In many cases, when I asked the family why the patient quit taking their hypertension medication, they described the patient as “not …
The unstoppable momentum of a medical “fact” with no source
Life is short, so make yours extraordinary. Capitalize on what makes you, YOU, and be your own unapologetic self.
The Almighty designed us as unique but imperfect and flawed individuals, prone to sin and blundering error. But that’s the great part of being human; we’re expected to sin, blunder, and make mistakes. We’re made to err for the sake of learning and growth; otherwise, we’d wither into uninspiring nothingness. Keep this …
Bring the real You to your workplace
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