A few months ago I went to visit my brother in San Francisco. My sister-in-law picked me up from the airport with my four-year-old nephew in the backseat. Shortly into our car ride from the airport, my nephew says out loud, “My leg hurts.”
I replied, “I’ll check it when I get home.” To which he retorted, “No, I want a doctor to check it.”
“I am a doctor,” I shouted out.
He …
Researching violence is something we must do
“It is far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has.”
– Hippocrates
The Internet has the ability to connect us regardless of geographic location, socioeconomic status and age — it really has no boundaries. I grew up in a time when today’s technology was not the norm and having a pen pal offered you a way to connect with someone you didn’t otherwise know.
Nowadays, …
What can we learn from inspirational physicians?
Dear Fizzy, MD:
Your article on part-time physicians “ruining” medicine really struck a chord with me. That you, as a mother and a wife, chose to prioritize your wholeness and family above career is commendable. I applaud your courage to chart your own course in the face of a work culture that undermines your wellbeing while at the same time, expects you to deliver health and healing to others …
The guilt and shame heaped on part-time physicians must stop
Physician cure thyself.
After 30 years of participation in multiple medical staffs, including small regional hospitals and large academic settings, there is one constant that continually undermines how content physicians are with their medical practice and the health care system. Many challenges in patient care seem insurmountable. From declining reimbursements to intensified quagmire of bureaucracy, the practicing physician, whether employed or not is berated by administrative authorities with no experience in …
How to change from a divisive to a collaborative medical staff
I could wallpaper a rather large wall with my diplomas, certificates, awards, and licenses. Each gilded slip of paper demarcates a moment in the last 20 years when I finished, graduated, certified or did any one of many steps required to become a board certified physician. Yet, after all of the sleepless nights, deferred self-care and catastrophic debt — after all this — 3 years ago I sat at my …
How I became the doctor I always wanted to be
Did you see this recent post on MedPage Today? “Burnout: Is Medical School the Staging Area? Burnout prevention starts in medical school.”
The article describes important new work at the University of Chicago Pritzker School Of Medicine to improve medical student resilience. It’s great to see medical schools addressing burnout and equipping students with valuable coping mechanisms.
As the post states, “One way to do this is to induce a greater resiliency …
Lean provides a way to prevent physician burnout
Perhaps the greatest flaw in medical training is our blatant avoidance of any education related to the business of medicine. Primarily focused on treating illness, trainees often don’t want to hear about how they are going to be compensated in the future, and medical school administrators fear that such training would further decrease interest in specialties that reimburse at a lower rate per unit time. Some doctors get 10s and …
This is the greatest flaw in medical training
For decades, many physicians have been pushing for comprehensive tort reform on the national level. Malpractice claims in the U.S. are twice those of other developed countries such as England, Canada, and Germany. Payouts in a U.S. claim can easily reach 3 million dollars or more; in Germany most claims are around $30,000 or less.
A survey conducted by RAND in 2011 estimates that 99 percent of American physicians in high-risk …
Why doctors will continue playing defense in the clinic
With the depths of winter just around the corner, doctors and nurses everywhere know what’s about to hit them over the next few months. The inevitable surge in hospital admissions during colder weather is almost as predictable as knowing the leaves will be falling off the trees in the fall.
As someone who has worked in several different hospitals over the last few years, ranging from small rural institutions to large …
Hospitals and doctors should better prepare for winter. Here’s how.
There is only one correct, perfect, absolute approach to life and decisions near its end. This truth relieves the doctor of final decision. The right way lifts the burden of anxiety, confrontation or guilt. The perfect path makes giving care at a very hard time, much easier. That correct course, the only way to treat every patient and every family, is exactly what the patient and family say it is.
This …
For each cancer patient, there is one perfect path
So, you’ve finished all your job interviews and think you’ve found a perfect fit. Graduating from residency is exciting, but did you get any training on what it all means to sign on the dotted line?
Below is a quick and dirty run-down of the contracting process from an industry insider.
1. Non-compete clauses. Non-compete clauses are not just a big med phenomenon; they are part of contracts in many different clinical settings. …
7 things doctors should consider before signing for a new job
I am constantly coming across articles of physicians with strong voices. Physicians that are jaded. Physicians that didn’t go into medicine to be defined by patient satisfaction surveys. Physicians that didn’t go into medicine expecting that people wouldn’t trust in their training because the Internet begs to differ. Physicians that cringe at the drive-through mentality that patients can present with diagnoses in hand and demands for tests to be done. Physicians …
Physicians are jaded, but this is what keeps them in medicine
“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
– Rudyard Kipling
I read Drs. Dhand’s and Carbone’s post with great interest: Physicians are not providers: An open letter to the AMA and medical boards. I began writing a comment; it turned into an essay.
I support Drs. Dhand and Carbone in this endeavor. The word “provider” diminishes the people who cure, treat, and heal, whether they’re physicians, nurses, …
The word “provider” dehumanizes any person who cares for patients
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The past year had been a tremendously exciting time to be an oncologist, and to be a lung cancer oncologist in particular. It seems we hardly have time to get used to one newly approved agent before another one becomes available. In 2015, we have seen gefitinib (don’t I know you from somewhere?), afatinib, nivolumab (twice), pembrolizumab, necitumumab, and osimertinib all …
This is why a computer algorithm cannot ever fully replace a doctor’s judgment
At some point in our lives, and it probably happens more often than we’d like to admit, we fake it.
Let’s get real, shall we friends?
Think about it. Your mother is having heart surgery in a small town across the country. You are, frankly, worried sick. Do you tell anyone in the operating room, especially your patient?
What would you do?
If you’re like me (OK, this was me recently), you fake it. You smile at your …
How can physicians know when to fake it?
A presentation given to the bioethics committee, Sacred Heart Hospital, Pensacola, FL.
My presentation today is about the challenge, professionally and emotionally created by certain external forces, which encompasses bioethical issues when one’s roles merge.
I am privileged and blessed to have many roles in my life: physician, wife, daughter, mother, now grandmother, sister, aunt, friend, and colleague. At times, these roles blend, other times, they are murky and can cause intense …
The ethical implications when physicians’ roles merge
“How much experience do you have with human suffering?” It was a question asked of me at my first medical school admission interview, and it took me by surprise. I was expecting to be asked about my volunteer experience, my research, or my desire to become a physician. The simple truth is that most of us really don’t have that much experience with human suffering when we’re in our 20s.
The …
Physicians experience grief in a different way
As a pediatrician and future mother of black children, I am worried. I am worried about my patients who face possible death if they appear threatening to the wrong police officer, like Tamir Rice. I am worried about my patients who might be sleeping peacefully in their families’ home when law enforcement officials burst in with grenades like the ones that killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones. I am worried about my teenage …
Let’s demand accountability for the safety and well-being of our children
There was a time within my professional lifetime when old records would arrive on the medical ward in a wheeled wire basket, multiple volumes with shabby pages. And in the VA of the 1980s, which still had veterans of World War I who never lived anywhere else the previous half century, the forklift could deliver not only the charts but the x-ray films that had not yet been sent to …
The demise of the hospital discharge summary
As the awareness and recognition of concussion in sports continue to increase and the frightening long-term outcomes for frequently and severely concussed athletes are realized, as a physician I cannot help but advocate drastic changes in football. Of the major sports, it sees the highest rates of concussion, and for every highly publicized Greek tragedy of a broken NFL star (Jim McMahon, Junior Seau, Dave …
We should radically change the way we play football
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