My husband recently found a bag of breast milk in the freezer as he scrounged for dinner ingredients. This milk was pumped over four years ago for my third baby who turns five next week. Just like I did for her older siblings, I religiously pumped breast milk at work until her first birthday. On the day that she turned one, I stopped lugging my pump bag to work, stopped …
When this doctor and mom stopped breastfeeding
Chicken tikka masala, two samosas and a bowl of yellow dal steam on my hotel table. There is no fight over the last samosa — they all belong to me. The room is quiet and peaceful. My pager does not ring. The paper plates do not need washing. No child clamors for my attention. After savoring dinner, the internal debate starts over whether I should work out in the hotel …
Is locum tenens your dream gig?
“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 …
Radiation oncologists aren’t just strangers in the basement
In the last few years as documentation demands from insurers have skyrocketed, the buck has been passed straight into the lap of physician’s offices where insurers have saved billions of dollars even as they’ve slashed physician reimbursements by even more.
Is it any wonder our offices are chaotic, patients complain about long waits, insurance issues, referrals, pre-authorizations, and copays? Do we have to do it all? Why? Simply because we were …
What’s the one thing doctors can learn from corporations?
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 …
Compassion, respect, and camaraderie are keys to fight physician depression
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 …
How an insurance company auditor tried to destroy a physician’s career
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, …
Practice at the top of your license: What does that really mean?
When I was a third-year resident, I was invited to join a practice owned by a doctor who had once been my chief resident. This was considered by all of my fellow residents to be the plum job in town, and I was thrilled. The doctor, whom I shall call “John,” was smart and funny and had a huge practice that he had purchased from a retiring physician. We figured …
A physician’s ex-business partner is in prison. Here’s what this doctor learned.
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 …
2 questions every physician should ask themselves
Chances are that if you have kids, you’ve had at least one unplanned visit to the hospital. Taking care of children in the emergency department (ED) is a special challenge for many reasons including the fact that the child’s parents don’t choose to see me specifically, they are usually meeting me for the first time, and they’re meeting me under very stressful circumstances.
When I started practicing medicine 20 years ago, …
The unsung heroes of sick kids
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 …
Why would any woman discourage a man’s advocacy or support?
There is a lot of discussion about what to do about physician burnout. The conversation includes debates on the actual incidence of burnout, why it varies among specialties and work environments, who is responsible for it and what can be done to combat it.
What matters is the solution for the physician on the front line, who is experiencing disconnection and disillusionment with a career they spent most of their life …
5 ways for physicians to fight burnout
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“Come on, bring it on! Come on, bring it on!” the little girl repeatedly chanted behind the drawn curtain in the pre-op holding area. I pulled the curtain back and peered in to see my young patient in the bed and happy as a lark, her mother was sitting next to her trying to contain her laughter. Other patients and staff members giggled as they passed by, hearing this mantra …
Where’s the humor in medicine?
I cannot begin to count the number of misspellings that I have witnessed of my first name. The number of “As” and the pronunciation confuse both first-timers and my closest friends. Its spelling on my first elementary school report card set the rhythm for things to come, from high school diplomas to wedding tabletop cards. And as I wandered around stateside for college and medical training, different interpretations led to …
What happened to the first name in medicine?
It seems you can’t open a magazine or surf the web these days without reading about Marie Kondo, the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Kondo has attained a cult-like status for her ability to help people improve their lives by radically reducing their stuff, and her new show on Netflix has inspired a national decluttering frenzy.
For those of …
What Marie Kondo can teach us about physician burnout
To do the math right, you have to get your numerator and denominator correct, or else things just don’t work.
Recently, in the midst of a large patient safety and quality improvement project trying to bridge gaps in breast cancer screening among our patients, we discovered that one of the large databases of patients who were attributed to us contained innumerable …
How one insurer’s mistake wrecked a practice’s quality score
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 …
How physicians can use Marie Kondo’s KonMari Method
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 …
Direct primary care physicians are not concierge doctors
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