I could hear the scream from across the room. It was shrill and filled with panic. Any parent can identify the difference between the cries of normal toddler discomforts and a true emergency.
I dropped what I was doing in the kitchen and found my three year old lying motionless on the ground, unable to move his left arm. My five year old was looking sheepishly down at the carpet, afraid …
Most doctors well into their tenure of medical already have a general idea about how other specialists spend their days (except for radiation oncologists, where no one else knows what they do). However, as a medical student, I had incredibly limited insight into the variety of means to practice medicine. Even as an attending physician, I am still discovering how creative some medical specialties allow one to be. For instance, …
Dear friends— especially my colleagues,
I recently failed a class (I have been working on a PhD in psychology) and found myself immobilized and disengaged from life, personal happiness and joy. I actually didn’t even tell my husband, who is my true confidant of my feeling and thoughts, until the following day. I found myself in that familiar place of guilt and shame. I thought I had transformed a lot of …
Why is your hospital always full? Actually, it’s more than full. You have twenty boarders in the ED. You turned your postop recovery unit into an overnight surge center. Every day administrators beg you to please, please discharge patients, if possible before 11 a.m. You’ve hired an army of case managers, dissected the discharge process, and held countless capacity management meetings, but you’re still bursting at the seams.
It wasn’t always …
This article is sponsored by Careers by KevinMD.com.
Whether you recently completed your residency as an emergency medicine (EM) physician or are ready to move on from your current position, potential locations for work are undoubtedly a big factor in determining which emergency physician jobs you’re willing to consider.
If you have children, location is especially important, because you want …
I’m often asked to write and speak about being a woman physician. I don’t know that any of my male physician colleagues have ever been asked to talk about being a male physician. Many hospital systems have women in medicine groups, and there’s now a National Women Physicians Day. Again, don’t know of the same for male physicians. There’s a part of me that struggles with this, but I …
When I first turned to writing, I had no knowledge of the field of narrative medicine.
It took four years of medical school, three years of residency, three years of subspecialty fellowship and over a decade in practice before I learned of it. (That’s more than 20 years, for those counting.)
Throughout, I’ve struggled to hold fast to my core belief that the key to patient care is to allow the telling …
We don’t talk much about passion in medicine anymore.
What is your passion for medicine? What was it that sparked your initial desire to pursue this career instead of another? What is the impact you are called to make as a doctor?
I was speaking with a friend who is not in medicine and asked why he picked his chosen field. He is knowledgeable and skilled at many different things. He admitted …
“We have a consult for radiation oncology regarding a 60-year-old gentleman with a history of lung cancer and is currently admitted. His oncologist is Dr. Heme Onc.”
As a new radiation oncology resident, I was surprised to hear the consulting physician refer to the patient’s medical oncologist as “his oncologist.” What about the patient’s radiation oncologist? Indeed, I remembered the patient well: he was diagnosed with Stage IIIB non-small cell lung …
My story starts like most individuals who enter into medical training. I had the dream that being a physician was my life calling to bring physical healing to others. While I did gain medical knowledge and skills, I also unintentionally developed a jaded mentality. I was quickly introduced to the reality of medical culture in which public embarrassment from “pimping” (a series of difficult intentionally unanswerable questions posed to medical …
Do you feel like you’re always saying “no” to your child and not getting the response from them that you are looking for? Do you end up repeating yourself over and over, so frustrated you begin to yell or just given in to your toddler’s demands? Unfortunately, I hear this way too often from moms, so I wanted to give some tips on the art of saying “no” that will …
It’s no secret that in today’s health care market, insurance companies are calling the shots. As a pediatrician in private practice for almost two decades, I’ve seen insurance companies transform into perhaps the single most powerful player in today’s health care landscape — final arbiters whose decisions about which procedures or medications to authorize effectively end up determining the course of patient care.
Decisions made by insurers, such as MassHealth, have …
A guest column by the American College of Physicians, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
Much has been discussed in recent years around the concept of “practicing at the top of your license.” But what does this really mean?
The most common definition is that each medical professional’s routine activities should utilize the full extent of their education, training, …
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The numbers are in. Medscape National Physician Burnout, Depression & Suicide Report 2019 indicates that the rate of physician burnout is still at an all-time high. Forty-four percent of physicians reported feeling burnt out.
According to the report, 50 percent of women reported experiencing burnout versus 38 percent of men. Carol Bernstein, MD, a psychiatrist at NYU Langone Medical Center, states that the reasons for the difference …
A male interventional radiologist who is active in the #HeForShe campaign recently told me that he is being pressured to stop advocating for women. My first instinct was the biggest sigh and eyeroll of my life followed by thoughts of locker room peer pressure and boys’ club type discussions.
But the criticism did not just come from men; many women are asking him to stop. That they don’t need a knight …
Marie Kondo, the best-selling guru of organization and “sparking joy” has established the foundation of getting a space organized and functional. Her do-it-all-once method, known as the KonMari Method, is considered healthy and life-altering for those seeking organization and productivity in their space. One of the ideal places to organize is the home office especially for doctors, nurses and medical professionals who have reading, studying and research to do. You …
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This article is sponsored by Careers by KevinMD.com.
Academic and education environments tend to use the word curriculum vitae, or CV, more frequently than resume. But, a CV’s purpose is the same: to get you a job.
Although a CV generally contains more information than a standard resume, the keys to a successful CV are still brevity and …
I recently received a scathing email criticizing an article I wrote about the care of patients in underserved areas. “Should you really even get to write articles about poor, underserved populations when you run a concierge practice?” the author wrote. “This is called hypocrisy. You are what is wrong with the medical field.”
What the author of this email didn’t know was that I spent six years working for the underserved …
My friend, Lello Tesema, and I were sitting in a restaurant in Harvard Square. It was the first, feverish bit of spring when it seems like the entire city has emerged en masse from their winter dens. We were sitting outside under patio lights, wearing regular clothes instead of our usual scrubs. I should have been happy.
As often happened in those days, I asked Lello if things were ever going …
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Several patients seen in our practice recently were significantly and dramatically transformed by the electronic health record (EHR). And not in a good way.
Take, for instance, the patient whose outside chart was reviewed when she showed up in our office for a follow-up appointment after an emergency department visit.
The notes from the emergency department providers, including a scribe and the …
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