Americans believe in experts. We look to CPAs to complete our tax returns, lawyers to handle our disputes, plumbers to fix our pipes. So it baffles me that an astounding number of us turn to movie stars and other celebrities for health advice.
Take a recent article in Parents magazine: “Where 13 Celebrity Parents Stand …
Why do patients turn to celebrities for health advice?
I love sports analogies. There is so much in competition and team play that mirrors the way departments work in many sectors of medicine. “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team,'” as the adage says. Michael Jordan, for example, did not win his championships in the NBA until he had fairly decent and dependable team of support around him. The stars in many sports cannot achieve the greatest height of success …
Medicine isn’t a competition. It’s a team sport.
I never wanted to be a drug pusher. A career in medicine was the opposite — healing in place of harming. However, I knew something was wrong when a detective asked to speak to me about one of my patients. My patient, addicted to Vicodin, had committed several acts of fraud and theft in desperate attempt to satisfy her needs. Her arrest was the final step in a long, slow …
I’m a doctor but I didn’t mean to be a drug pusher
It was mid-afternoon in the ever-bustling surgical intensive care unit (ICU). The nurse, one of those experienced, battle-hardened savants of human symptoms, called me into one of the patient rooms. He was tachypneic on the ventilator with labored breathing and declining oxygen saturations; with each inspiration, his diaphragm would paradoxically elevate, his stomach bulge and the ventilator alarm with the dyssynchrony. Intubated, sedated and unaware, he was fighting for his …
A physician is often the only person that sets the tone of hope, or despair
In 2017, The Lancet published a report on the international lack of palliative care. It is a tale of woe documenting the sorry state of unrelieved global suffering. Everywhere “people live and die with little or no palliative care or pain relief.” It describes the “access abyss” in which the poor live and die in extreme suffering without receiving pain-relieving medications. They describe the world in …
Palliative care is a right of all people in pain
There has been a nauseating amount of discussion about physician burnout lately. An equal number of remedies, from mindfulness to exercise, to inpatient psychiatric treatment for doctors experiencing unmanageable stress and burnout. And then I read this report of a survey from the world-famous Cleveland Clinic, which describes 35 percent of nearly 1100 physicians employed the Cleveland Clinic have signs of overt burnout. More importantly, those physicians who cared more about their …
Political leaders are oblivious to the true causes of physician burnout
Our local media, in an effort to raise awareness and increase vaccination rates, devoted a lot of time to the unusually harsh flu outbreak this winter. While well intended, the stories about children getting morbidly ill inadvertently led to a flood of families coming to our emergency room and urgent care centers fearful that their child would be next to get very ill or die.
On one of my recent Friday …
How squeaky brakes reminded this doctor of the joys of primary care
At 69, Bob appeared to be a broken man. He left the hospital the day before and returned to the emergency department (ED) because he wasn’t “acting right.” Bob became upset when a second injection to his abdomen burned, and family members were angry that the discharge instructions did not explain this.
After four years of receiving treatment for metastatic colon cancer, Bob had reached the breaking point of persecution, but …
Sometimes death is not an option
If a physician has a substance use or mental health problem, it is in everyone’s interest — the physicians themselves, their patients and their families — for them to get treatment. And if they go for treatment, they deserve to be treated fairly, but given my six years of experience as an associate director in one state physician health program (PHP) and in working with physicians from all across the …
Using marijuana 2 times a month cost this doctor his license
My desire to write this piece stems from my recent realization that I wasted a good part of my early career in medicine. While I was happily working in my pathology “bubble,” I was completely oblivious to the great untapped potential I had to affect change not just within, but also outside of, my department. In an effort to encourage other physicians to find ways to make an impact, I …
5 ways to build a relationship with hospital administrators
In the fall of 2012, I entered treatment for addiction as a broken physician and man. Opioids were one of my drugs of choice, as they are for so many in today’s society. After weeks of intensive therapy, I was able to let go of the demons that had haunted me for decades, ones that I had medicated away with drugs and alcohol. More than 100 days later, I left the …
Recovery from substance-use disorder is not always celebrated
A 60-year-old lady came for follow-up after a recent stay in the hospital. She was diabetic — horribly uncontrolled — the result of which was that she had already been on dialysis for four years. She ended up in the emergency room with chest pain. Diabetic patients are at higher risk than the general population of having heart attacks.
She underwent studies to evaluate for blockages in her heart. The cardiologist …
The difficult conversations physicians have with patients
When someone you love who has always been healthy and a go-getter suddenly takes ill, it can be very scary and confusing for both of you. It can be particularly scary and confusing for your loved one. Your loved one, while healing, is also experiencing grief/loss, and not just over the loss of health. Even as adults, we can sometimes feel like bad things won’t ever happen to us. Feeling …
What do you do when your loved one becomes suddenly ill?
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Practicing medicine sometimes feels a bit like pulling teeth, and getting regular exercise often resembles flossing.
I have only recently started flossing on a regular basis. For most of my life, the bulk of my flossing activities would happen in the few days before my rapidly approaching dentist appointments. The “logic” I used to employ: I could make up for months of neglect by applying some short-term elbow grease to the …
6 reasons how exercise makes you a better physician
A recent sports injury required me to have surgery. As a cardiothoracic surgeon, my experience as “the patient” reminded me of lessons-learned years ago on finding one’s purpose. You should never underestimate your capacity as a health care professional to dramatically impact the lives of your patients.
As a pre-med in college, I interviewed at Johns Hopkins Medical School under an early decision program. I was beyond excited. After my interview, …
How to find purpose in the age of burnout
A survey of 1,000 volunteer adults found 71% regularly watched medical television dramas, but only 12% said the shows “were a reliable source of health information.”
The participants were given some brief vignettes describing scenarios where CPR was administered: a 54-year-old who suffered a heart attack at home and received CPR by paramedics, an 80-year-old with a postoperative cardiac arrest in the hospital after surgery, and a post-traumatic arrest in an …
The public’s unrealistic expectations about CPR
There are two doctors working at the local hospital. They are both around the same age, been in practice for several years, and in the same specialty.
Dr. Cooper grew up in Ohio and went to medical school in California, before moving to New York after his residency training. Dr. Steele grew up in Michigan, where he also went to medical school, before completing his residency in Florida, and then ending …
Communication skills: a tale of 2 doctors
She is 61, and she can’t help but smack her lips together repetitively. She has no teeth, and the curvature of her spine makes her a miniature version of what she once was. Her frizzy hair is a purple-gray tone, and there are dark particles of something in the knots alongside her left temple. Her clothes are too loose, and there are food stains on her shirt. The ambulance arrived …
How this emergency physician’s shift really went
Over 17 million cosmetic surgery and minimally invasive procedures were performed in the U.S. in 2016. With the increasing popularity of cosmetic procedures, it seems nearly everyone is out to get a bite of the apple.
Cosmetic surgery chains are growing in size and popularity in an attempt to cash in on this market. Examples include: LifeStyle Lift in the U.S., which declared bankruptcy in 2015 …
The truth about plastic surgery chains
4:00 p.m. Right on time.
I am walking down the street with my brother on his first visit to me in residency; I’m only two weeks in.
I turn to him: “Wait a second.”
I place my hand on the cement wall next to us, and I start to heave.
“Um … are you OK?”
“Yeah. No worries. My body’s just adjusting.”
I go on to describe how every day at 4 p.m. after a 24-hour …
Intern year is still universally hard. Intern year is also universally great.
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