Physician

What MS can teach cardiologists about disease

Physician
October 10, 2025

At the recent ECTRIMS Congress in Barcelona, researchers presented data that should make every specialist pause. In a claims analysis of nearly 70,000 patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), 98 percent of infections were first detected not in neurology clinics, but in primary care and other non-neurology practices. Even “serious” infections requiring hospitalization were almost entirely picked up elsewhere. The message was clear: Specialists, by design, often miss the forest for …

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What an active shooter taught me about being a doctor

Physician
October 10, 2025

“Do you know what it feels like, to know you could die at any moment?” His words linger in the air, heavy, long after the threat of violence has passed, long after our team has calmed him with words and soft gestures. It is not the first time a patient’s family member has swung at me, nor will it be the last. But it is the first time with a …

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Physician leadership in moments of crisis

Physician
October 10, 2025

There’s a common belief that leadership requires a title after your name, an office on the top floor, and people looking to you for direction. But in medicine, leadership happens at every level.

Take me, for example. I’m an attending physician, whose role on the team is as a hospitalist. In the hierarchy of medicine, it’s easy to dismiss this role as “just a physician.”

Yet there’s nothing “just” about it when …

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A pilgrimage to Italy with prostate cancer

Physician
October 10, 2025

The pilgrimage of my dreams included a suitcase full of diapers, extra pants, and a quiet prayer for dignity. Italy has always been a dream destination for me. As a Catholic, I consider Rome the Holy City of my faith, and this year’s Jubilee motivated me to visit the four Holy Doors. I also love art and culture, and Italy is home to many historic sites and great works of …

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The power of ordinary joy for physician well-being

Physician
October 9, 2025

I just spent a weekend doing absolutely nothing. Well, nothing memorable, anyway. The week before, I’d been on home call during an Epic upgrade. If you’ve lived through one of these updates, you know the chaos. In addition to the usual phone calls about echo results, arranging studies, and communicating with referring physicians, I was getting a constant stream of secure chat notifications updating me on the system’s progress. These …

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Leadership is about pulling others up

Physician
October 9, 2025

When I first stepped onto a college campus, I was the first in my entire family to do so. Coming from a humble immigrant background, community college was my gateway. Like many community college students, I was nontraditional, new to the country, starting from scratch. This was my first exposure to the American educational system, and I was just trying to figure it out while working multiple jobs.

Eventually, I served …

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The opioid crisis in wealthy zip codes

Physician
October 9, 2025

To be honest, I never imagined myself treating A-list celebrities and professional athletes in Manhattan. As a young physician in Juárez, Mexico, I spent my earliest years working in community clinics and even pharmacies on the city’s impoverished peripheries. Back then, the idea of practicing at one of the most prestigious hospitals in the United States (let alone as a pain management specialist) was unthinkable. And yet, only a few …

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A doctor’s promise after a patient’s suicide

Physician
October 8, 2025

Suicide is the elephant in the room in medicine. We rarely speak about it openly, yet it remains a silent epidemic, among our patients, and tragically, among physicians themselves.

I first encountered this reality as a medical student in Tennessee in 2022. One of my earliest patients was not much younger than I was. Because we were close in age, I felt we …

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The first week of an attending physician

Physician
October 8, 2025

On my first week of onboarding as an attending, before I had seen a single patient, I met the boulder in a training room.

It arrived as a screenshot. The EHR instructor clicked into a demo chart and a cascade opened: quality gaps, refill requests, preventive care nudges, “smart” routing rules that promised efficiency and smelled faintly of delegation without authority. I had imagined the threshold to attendinghood as a clean …

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Why women ER doctors earn $21,000 less than men

Physician
October 8, 2025

Two emergency physicians with similar training work at the same hospital. Both have twelve years of experience. Both are contracted to work 2,000 hours per year, see roughly twenty patients per shift, and supervise staff. One is a man, the other is a woman. The same work, the same training, the same conditions. Not the same salary: The woman earns about $21,000 less each year.

That is not a hypothetical. That …

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A poem for a physician in the ICU

Physician
October 7, 2025

In the ER, we ask, Was he wearing a seatbelt
Partly for the note, but partly so we can remove ourselves
From exploded flesh, splintered bones,
Not sure if we can save that eye.
Something in us says, that will not be me;
I take precautions. We live on,
On the strength of the stories we tell ourselves.

But in the ICU, when one of our own has come in,
After a well-informed try at smothering the spark,
There …

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The stoic cure for modern anxiety

Physician
October 7, 2025

Our one and only daughter has gone off to college. My wife and I dropped her off the weekend before. As we made the four-hour drive from Houston to Baton Rouge along I-10, the road stretched ahead, both endless and fleeting, as if time itself were torn between holding on and letting go. Between bursts of laughter and quiet silences, we spoke of classes, friendships, boys, the discipline of focus, …

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Obesity is the infant of time poverty

Physician
October 7, 2025

When most people talk about obesity, the blame often falls on donuts, McDonald’s, fast food, lack of exercise, or lack of willpower.

But as a primary care physician, I see a different reality. Obesity is not always born from a donut, and it is not always caused by time poverty. Yet in many cases, it grows out of time poverty, a system that robs people of the space to think, to …

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The difference between a leader, a manager, and an innovator

Physician
October 7, 2025

The gimmick of the day is to make -preneur the suffix of the year. Solopreneurs. Doctorpreneurs. Digipreneurs. Trumpreneurs. It should come as no surprise then, that leaderpreneur has appeared in your latest Google search. What is a leaderpreneur, anyway, and why should anyone care? Recognizing that there are as many definitions of leadership, entrepreneurship, and innovation as there are practitioners of those arts, here is my take:

Entrepreneurship is the pursuit …

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A doctor’s struggle with burnout and boundaries

Physician
October 6, 2025

I had been hearing so much about burnout in medicine; and one day, I realized it had crept up on me. It began at my mother’s funeral, when an acquaintance, a former family friend, approached me asking me to examine her painful toe. I tried to avoid her, yet I could not say no. Through my grief and exhaustion, conditioned by years of striving to live a life of purpose, …

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Unhooking from the ego in medicine

Physician
October 5, 2025

These days, getting spun out into a state of worry and panic is just a click away: Turn on any device for constant updates on the chaos around us.

Adding to this, on a personal level, the last six years have been the most difficult and transformative period of my life. I had never imagined that I would experience and recover from the darkness of depression and suicidality six years ago, …

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Why doctors strike: a matter of survival

Physician
October 5, 2025

Ever been so tired you forgot your own name? I remember a junior doctor on strike in London who told me exactly that. Thirty-six hours awake, stumbling into the children’s ward, staring at a prescription pad. “I couldn’t even remember my own name,” he said, “let alone the right antibiotic dose.”

That was not about wages. That was about survival, his and the children’s.

Yet the story always gets told the same …

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Stop trying to lead doctors like corporate employees

Physician
October 5, 2025

Everywhere in American medicine today, you hear the word leadership. Hospitals advertise leadership programs. AMCs hold leadership retreats. Colleagues are urged to “develop as leaders.” Yet when you talk to practicing doctors (the ones actually seeing patients), most will tell you all they want is to do their work, fairly scheduled, with decent colleagues, and without interference.

That is the paradox of the physician leader. Everyone talks about leadership, but almost …

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Rethinking the value of the annual physical

Physician
October 4, 2025

We were walking up the fairway on the ninth hole when one of my patients asked, “Larry, when should I come in for my annual?” I had a seven-iron in hand, breeze at my back, and I answered without thinking: “Doesn’t matter.” He looked at me like I had just duffed a wedge. To him, it sounded like I did not care. In a way, I suppose I mishit that …

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The role of faith and culture in patient recovery

Physician
October 3, 2025

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I cared for a patient in the intensive care unit whose condition was critical. When I asked how he was feeling, he said, “Doctor, I am not afraid. My family is praying for me, and I believe God will give me strength.” Despite receiving the best medical interventions available, it was clear that his faith, cultural practices, and the support of his family played an undeniable …

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