Physicians writing on KevinMD about the life of the profession: the work itself, the exhaustion, what women physicians are paid and asked to carry, the losses the profession has been slow to name, and who decides how physicians work. Five maintained records draw on this archive: Physician burnout: what physicians say, in their own words, Primary care: what physicians say, in their own words, Women in medicine: what women physicians say, in their own words,, Physician suicide: what physicians say, in their own words, and Physicians and administrators: what physicians say about who runs medicine, in their own words.
More than 36,000 aspiring physicians recently matched into residencies across the United States.
More than 7,500 earned their degrees at international medical schools. These newly minted doctors, many of whom are U.S. citizens who chose to study abroad, will play an outsized role in treating the underserved communities hit hardest by the pandemic.
It’s well known that the United States faces a massive — and worsening — shortage of doctors. The country …
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Here’s how we can rebuild health care post-pandemic
Programs and applicants displayed incredible adaptations during the 2020-2021 virtual residency interview season despite the adversity they faced due to COVID-19.
Moving forward, virtual features may be integrated with traditional methods for a more equitable and favorable experience. We present here a discussion on the pros and cons of the 2020-2021 “virtual” residency interview season — and ways of hybridizing virtual and in-person practices that reimagine modern interviewing and improve applicant …
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The future of residency interviews
“Something’s wrong with Eddie.”
In four words, my entire wedding day collapsed around me. I’d just arrived at a beautiful Gothic chapel in a rented 1950 Rolls Royce, mom and dad on either side of me, prepared for a picture-perfect first look with my groom. As his mother’s words echoed in my ear, I immediately thought of all the scenarios that could be easily remedied so we could move forward with …
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How a doctor fell in love with a drug addict
In my first year as an attending hospitalist, I personally discovered what Hippocrates realized millennia before, “Life is short and the art long.” Clinical reasoning is an intellectual labyrinth that can only be mastered with deliberate practice, introspection, and perseverance.
However, I soon found that spending hours poring through manuscripts and cases was not only cumbersome, but often counterproductive. It dawned on me then that athletes faced a similar predicament, one …
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How photography made me a better doctor
Most of us have heard the phrase “success is about who you know,” and that couldn’t be more true. The people we surround ourselves with are a direct reflection of our life and success. One thing that affects this is emotional intelligence, or EQ for short. It’s not just about how smart you are; it also has to do with your ability to understand and manage your own emotions and …
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Why physicians should care about emotional intelligence
The surgeon becomes the surgical patient. That was my summary thought after discussing my vision problem with my former partner, an ophthalmologist well versed in treating cataracts. Despite having performed eye surgery on thousands of patients in the course of my own professional career, the “privilege” of being on the other side of the knife was not without some anxiety.
Two factors helped limit my concern. First, I trusted my surgeon …
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The other side of the knife
Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of assisting more than 2,000 distressed physicians – some with burnout, others with “rough edges,” still others with psychiatric conditions or misuse of drugs and alcohol. Some of these doctors were still functioning well; others had lost their licenses and their livelihoods, hoping against hope that they would somehow be able to return to medicine. Linking all these physicians is a shared passion …
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Organizations that nurture physicians’ careers can attract and retain the best doctors
Maybe it’s a testament to a hardy relationship that there was no resulting argument. Without thinking, I blurted out, “You are so sexist!” I could immediately tell by my husband’s face, his upper eyelids and eyebrows lifted a bit, his mouth freeze-framed in a small “o” — my exclamation surprised and insulted him. Maybe it was a completely unfair assessment; after all, he was standing at the sink, his hands …
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Confession from a female doctor: I am sexist
The pandemic has impacted many of us around the world, especially the frontline health care workers — myself included here in Melbourne, Australia. It is time we address these issues and bring the conversation into the open.
Politicians talk about opening the borders for travel and revitalization post-COVID-19. They fail to talk about the emotional pain that the frontline health care workers went through during the pandemic and the lasting effect …
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The unspoken pandemic in frontline health care workers
I was born in Québec, the last of a family of six. My father was a family physician in a small community, and his office was in our house. I remember that the practice was busy, with lots of kids crying at night.
At the hospital, he would perform minor surgery, like an appendectomy. And he and the health care team enjoyed their work. There was no EMR, data was easy …
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Health care confusion: Where do leadership and well-being intersect?
1. You will be underestimated. This can look like many things: Little jokes about how young you look, having to correct how others say your name, having your orders questioned or not completed.
What got me through this was reminding myself why I was there: I am Dr. Patel here to take care of Patient X, and this is what we need to do. Make sure your badge works where it …
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8 things I learned in my first year as an attending
The mission of medicine is to heal the sick. When cure is elusive, it is to relieve distress, and always to comfort. All of us who became physicians had our reasons, but we had to have a genuine interest and ability in science, and an appreciation of people as individuals living in families and societies. We had to be willing to work hard to learn and to keep up with …
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The mission of medicine: not just a job
In medicine, there are those patients that know they have a morbid underlying diagnosis, and no doctor can convince them otherwise. And there are also those that know they are perfectly well and need no treatment, and no doctor can convince them otherwise.
The need for second opinions often arises out of such conflicts.
A patient’s request for a second opinion is not uncommon in medicine, though such a request is often …
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A physician’s opinion on second opinions
May 25th, 2021, marked the first anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. George Floyd was a victim of racial injustice. Tragically, he is not the only Black person to die at the hands of U.S. police officers over these past few years.
George Floyd’s death has brought renewed protests supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, first established back in 2013, after George Zimmerman’s acquittal, who shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed …
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Racial inequality in medicine must end
This month, the American Medical Association (AMA) officially released an ambitious three-year plan to dismantle structural racism within their organization by addressing past harms and examining institutional roles that uphold these structures. AMA launched this work in 2019, but the events of 2020 and 2021 highlighted the pervasiveness of racial inequity in health care and emphasizing the necessity for such a plan.
AMA’s plan is not just about organizational racism. …
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Addressing racial disparities in health begins upstream with racial equity in society
Despite reading numerous books tailored to the non-physicist, my rudimentary understanding of quantum physics suggests that quantum particles exist in multiple synchronous states and numerous synchronous positions. They are only truly defined upon the observation of that particle. Its nature fluctuates between particles and waves. Schrodinger and his famous thought experiment of the alive/not alive or dead/not dead cat, depending on one’s Weltanschauung, has popularized his observations.
While recently reading a …
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Physicians in a quantum state
In the book The Insanity of God, the writer had been an American missionary to Somalia during the late 1980s through early ’90s. This was a time when there was no place on earth with greater needs, hardships, suffering, and dying. It truly was hell on Earth. The missionary and his small team risked their lives with every trip into this most desolate of places where there was no order, …
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How to bring the human side back to medicine
Health care systems in the United States are beginning to emerge from the devastation of the pandemic. Since the existential threat of COVID-19 first hit in March of 2020 and the waves kept rolling across the country, doctors, nurses, and other clinicians put themselves and their families at risk to save others.
Clinicians were thrown into situations for which neither they nor their institutions were prepared. Like combat, the pandemic created …
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Caring for caregivers post-pandemic
Doctors have a few dirty little secrets. We have the highest rates of suicide amongst all professions and are in desperate need of mental health reform.
For those who don’t know what it’s like to work in this area, it can be difficult to understand the pressures that doctors face daily.
Doctors live their lives balancing an intense workload with long hours, often without any time for themselves or their families. Many …
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Doctors’ dirty little secrets
