Which arrow causes you more pain, the first or the second?
Fellow blogger Michelle at The Green Study recently posted a piece in which she distinguished between pain and suffering. It reminded me of a Buddhist teaching that inspires and humbles me. Blogger and curator extraordinaire
Maria Popova quotes it in an article she wrote last year on a book by Tara …
How mindfulness may ease your suffering
Anyone entering medical training is taught that medicine is an art, one that combines scientific knowledge, discovery and application with its practice. It is both art and applied science. It should never become nor has it ever been only all one or the other.
To be medicine at all, the noble vocation that so many brilliant minds sacrifice to pursue in service to their fellow humans, the practice must balance art …
A reminder that physicians are artists
My significant other is a physician working in Houston, and he missed Hurricane Harvey over the weekend, being out of town for a conference. The hospital sent out an S.O.S. asking faculty to do their best to come in. As the Houston airports continued to be closed Monday and Tuesday, he and his colleague, also a physician and a native of Houston, flew to another airport and drove a few …
Natural disasters in a time of telemedicine
Being a health care provider has always come with personal risk. We care for all patients, which includes patients agitated due to psychiatric issues, dementia, acute medical illness, alcohol or drug intoxication or just anger. Patients can be extremely volatile and lash out unexpectedly causing physical injury to their doctor, nurse or another provider. Besides the physical risk, patients can be emotionally and verbally abusive as well- and both types …
7 ways for doctors to stay safe at work
For American conservatives, Britain’s NHS is an antiquated Orwellian dystopia. For Brits, even those who don’t love the NHS, American conservatives are better suited to spaghetti westerns, such as Fistful of Dollars, than reality.
The twain are unlikely to meet after the recent press surrounding Charlie Gard, the infant, now deceased, with a rare, fatal mitochondrial disorder in which mitochondrial DNA is depleted — mitochondrial depletion disorder (MDD). In this condition, …
Did doctors know best in the Charlie Gard case?
In the early epoch of human development, mankind learned to shape and sharpen wood, stone and metal objects to facilitate plunging them deep into other humans’ chests, abdomens, skulls and eyes in the ultimate form of conflict resolution.
Over tens of thousands of years, other less pugilistic and more compassionate humans crudely — but later artfully — insinuated an increasingly sophisticated array of implements into the human corpus to cure diseases, …
Putting down the scalpel: The aging surgeon
One of the most difficult situations for a parent is one in which your child is sick. To be in a situation where you cannot control how the child responds to interventions is very challenging. Under normal circumstances, you follow your normal daily routine: up in the morning, breakfast, get dressed, off to school or daycare or activities for the day, a nap in the afternoon, pick up from school …
Being a resident and a parent is hard when your child gets sick
It’s a scenario that every doctor is familiar with. You are having a busy day and working full steam to get everyone better. You suddenly receive that unexpected message: “Mr. Johnson and his family are very upset and would like to speak with you now.”
Most of the time, any physician’s initial reaction will be one of irritation, disappointment or frustration: “My goodness, I’m working so hard here, and we have …
Your patient is angry. Here are 5 things physicians can do.
On our first night in Dublin, my mother and I head straight to a pub. We sit at a table across the room from a cheerful woman who looks to be in her eighties. It doesn’t take her long to walk across the room and join us. She grasps her pint of beer and takes a long gulp. We learn that her name is Mary and she welcomes us with …
A way to stop social isolation? Beer.
Approximately 18 months ago, I was asked to serve as the surgical director for operating room (OR) services at our children’s hospital. The opportunity has been an eye-opening experience in understanding how a hospital functions.
ORs are like the economic engine room in a large ocean-going vessel. Without them functioning optimally, the boat stops moving, and is batted about by of waves economic disruption. If surgical admissions drop below a certain …
Medical device companies will soon face hard audits
Doctors see firsthand the toll that today’s increasingly stressful society takes on patients: Engineers, office managers, teachers, you name it.
Work demands have increased, as has multitasking. Pressures outside the workplace add additional stress. Often, parents chauffeuring children to multiple activities must also care for aging parents with increasing needs. Electronic devices, always in hand or close by, command our attention (due to work or personal needs, sometimes simultaneously). Finding a …
Physician, heal thyself. With help.
My first year after completing surgical residency was an exhilarating and exhausting experience that most physicians will recall as part of their training. The American medical culture has imagined that the nation’s doctors — no matter their workload — simply don’t reach physical or emotional exhaustion in their work. But they do, and as we debate the future of healthcare in our country, we need to address this problem and quickly get to solutions, …
The hidden crisis within the health care crisis
I know, I know, I spend way too much time ranting about work in the emergency department. But after some recent shifts, my box of rants is full once more. And what I want to point out is the enormous struggle of the mid-sized emergency departments in America today.
I know this is a problem; I work in them, and I know and talk with people who work in them. It’s …
The plight of mid-sized emergency departments
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The other day, rather than being at the office, I was sitting in the waiting room of our favorite gastroenterologist’s endoscopy suite. I had dutifully accompanied my wife, who was getting her colonoscopy. My cell phone buzzed. It was my nurse calling from the office. I had seen a patient late the previous day who was complaining of right leg pain.
I had ordered a D-dimer, hoping the test would be …
Here’s what it looks like when our health system actually works
On a particularly sultry day in a hospital of the Peruvian Amazon, I found myself with the task of telling a group of parents that their babies, who had been waiting in the hallways for days without eating in preparation for surgery, would not be able to have their cleft lip and palate fixed. We, a group of American doctors and medical staff offering this procedure free of charge to …
The fine line between do no harm and do nothing
In my first year in the hospital, as a third-year medical student, there was one refrain I often heard from physicians and staff alike: This is a hospital, not a hotel. It was an expression of the frustration engendered by “needy patients,” those who were upset that their breakfast was late or that the room was too hot or that they couldn’t speak with the physician just this second. Often, …
Patients and doctors should give each other the benefit of the doubt
One day a man decided to open a pizza shop. The first week he sold pizzas and collected money from his customers; the happy customers ate hot pizza, and the man made some money.
The next week many of his customers who came in had pizza insurance, and had already paid Blue Wall Insurance for their pizzas. Since so many of his customers had purchased pizza insurance, the man signed a …
I am a gynecologic-oncologist. I work in the high-stakes realm of cancer care. I strategize complex treatment plans involving surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and the newer biological agents to treat the myriad of disease that we call collectively “cancer.” Cure — or at least control — requires urgent and timely administration of these modalities along with various imaging or blood work to assure that the treatment prescribed is effective. I love …
Dear insurance doctor: You are not my peer
To the patients concerned about the future of health care:
We need one another now more than ever.
In April last year, I started this blog to help patients and physicians connect in an increasingly disconnected health care system. Both patients and physicians feel bound and invaded from multiple directions, all interfering with the doctor-patient relationship. We all suffer for it.
It occurs to me that many of you may …
Patients and doctors need one another now more than ever
We have believed a lie to prop up an increasingly untenable system. We have behaved as if we could safely put our emotions aside to do our jobs at no substantial cost to ourselves in the process. We’ve all heard the admonishments.
“I don’t want my surgeon crying in the operating room. He needs to leave those emotions outside.”
Or: “This is just the way medicine is now. It has nothing to …
The deception at the heart of physician burnout #SustainableDocs
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