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.
Many of my best friends are in the medical field, and there are practical reasons for that. That said, I don’t think I could survive without the perspective of my equally good friends outside of medicine. In one way or the other, they are always reminding me of the following things:
1. Don’t take yourself so seriously. It’s true that at work we often deal with life or death situations. But …
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8 tips from my non-medicine friends that make me a happier doctor
In the current climate today, the awareness of racial discrimination has risen in most communities. However, dealing with racial bias in medicine is a rare topic, and while few studies have been done to show that racial bias and microaggressions do exist and have an impact on the care of our patients, racial bias within the physician community is not widely discussed.
Though not a popular topic, racial bias does exist …
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Racial bias in the physician community
After the birth of our second child, the two of us waved a white flag and started working part-time. We surrendered the notion that we could maintain two full-time health careers and still be effective parents and loving spouses. Not to mention sane and happy human beings.
It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Doors were opening to professional women, to two-career marriages, and to flexible work arrangements. Ours was the …
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Why we decided to “throw away our promising careers” and work part-time
Coming in to work at 8 a.m. was indeed a luxury for me. As my fellow anesthesiologists would concur, our life begins at 7 a.m. on a daily basis. Some administrative duty made this possible for me one day. This was a first for me, and I felt compelled to put down my musings in writing.
Preparing for this morning treat, I had made sure to set my alarm for thirty …
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The joys of coming to work 1 hour later
Sometimes we get help from unexpected sources. Two of my patients showed me this, during their recent hospitalizations.
The first is a woman I’ll call Hazel. I’ve taken care of her for twenty years, and she’s probably had emphysema for ten of those, but had not yet ever been hospitalized for it. She has continued to smoke, and I suspect that she has not gone out of the house much for …
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When patients get help from the unexpected
Not only have we shortened medical appointments to 15 minutes — we sometimes double book them.
I get the feeling that non-providers think of this as something fairly ordinary, and even reasonable. But it is often a very difficult and destructive thing to do.
The term “double booking” and the way it looks in an ordinary doctor’s scheduling grid suggest that the physician might possibly be expected to be in two places …
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Double booking patients is difficult and destructive
“I come as one. I stand as ten thousand.”
– Maya Angelou
I am a surgeon. I am proud of this fact partly because I am the first in my family to go to medical school. I am also proud of this fact because I recognize that me becoming a surgeon has been less about me and more of a collective and cumulative effort of my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and countless other …
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The silent lessons of my grandmother
I walked into a patient’s room and noticed the hospital has supplied a fold up stool hung on the wall labeled “For Physicians.”
I shrug. I take it down the stool and open it up and seat it next to the patient’s bed. I greet the patient, and we discuss how he feels and what all is transpiring and planned for the day. He feels cold, nervous, pain in his back, …
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Physicians provide a value to society that cannot be cheapened
A South Carolina jury awarded a woman $4,618,500 for a needlestick injury she sustained in the parking lot of a Target store.
She had parked her car, and while walking to the store, her daughter picked up a hypodermic needle. As she swatted the needle out of the child’s hand, it punctured the woman’s palm. She went into the store and notified an employee.
HIV post-exposure prophylaxis medications were prescribed which she …
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Should Target be responsible for a needlestick injury in its parking lot?
By now you’ve probably heard about the hospital that charged $39.35 for a woman who just had a cesarean section to hold her baby.
The baby’s father posted a copy of the bill on Reddit, and it drew over 11,800 comments. The story was also widely circulated on Twitter.
At least one labor and delivery nurse on Reddit and a spokesperson for Utah Valley Hospital where the baby was born stated that …
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How much should it cost to hold your newborn? $39.35?
I recently learned of yet another medical student suicide. Ari Frosch, a second-year student at Penn, died by suicide by walking onto the northbound tracks as a Boston-bound Amtrak train passed through Mansfield station. Amtrak trains do not stop at Mansfield station. Police have surveillance tape of the victim trespassing and walking right onto the tracks. There’s no mystery surrounding this medical student’s Read more…
How medical institutions cover up suicides
Another child has been severely harmed by a naturopath—this time, in the UK.
A four-year-old boy with autism received naturopathic treatments that landed him in the emergency room. The boy had severe dehydration and dangerously elevated calcium levels. A naturopath had prescribed a regimen of vitamin D, calcium, cod liver oil, zinc and a long list of other substances that included silver, enzymes, salts and trace minerals
As a …
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When naturopaths treat autism, children suffer
Recently I wrote about empowerment and the importance of letting patients make their own health care decisions. Our job is to make sure patients are given information and then allowed to choose the best option for them. Maybe we should even embolden patients; give them confidence and encourage them to take more control. Physicians tend to feel more comfortable advising according to the “standard of care” and …
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Patient satisfaction can be done right. Here’s how.
As an internal medicine physician, the #3 question people most often ask me is why I chose to be an internist. (The top two being “What is internal medicine?” and “What’s this thing growing on my genitals?”) So I thought that I would pull back the curtain and show how I made my decision.
According to Wikipedia, “Internal medicine or general medicine (in Commonwealth nations) is the medical specialty dealing with …
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The honest reasons why this doctor chose internal medicine
I went into medicine because I wanted to learn about the craft, become proficient at healing disease and easing suffering, and because I genuinely liked getting to know more about my patients and hearing their stories. These reasons for going into medicine as a career and staying in medicine as a vocation have not changed significantly through the last three decades.
The problem we are faced with pretty often nowadays is …
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The fine line that we walk as physicians
The pressures of time, the complexity of our patients’ needs and today’s documentation requirements can easily make a medical provider feel less than generous these days. We must counteract that in order to carry on as healers.
All day long, I am conscious of the time as I work my way through my long list of 15-minute encounters. But I am also conscious of the fact that the more pressure I …
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How this doctor handles the pressures of time
Something odd happens in medical school. It affects you as a patient, me as a provider, and state and federal budgets.
For the first two years of medical school, empathy levels stay the same while we bubble in multiple choice questions. Then third year comes. Eagerly, we drop the backpacks and pick up the stethoscope ready to see real life patients. What happens during this long awaited year? Read more…
How medical humanities can help physician burnout
Although I write a blog that centers people of color in exploring the connections between the medical system and race — an activity that has always been fundamentally personal — I rarely discuss how it personally affects me.
The occasions in which I have, were driven by my need to make sense of Trayvon and Walter, Tamir and Read more…
My anger isn’t the poison. Racism is.
