Physician

The power of embracing life’s seasons: rest, reflection, and growth

Physician

June 13, 2023

If we look around and spend time in nature or just walk outside, we realize everything has a season. The trees, the flowers, the weeds—they all change during the seasons. Flowers don’t constantly bloom; trees show their beautiful display of colors on their leaves, shed them, and grow a new set of beautiful leaves each year. There is constant change. As famously said by Heraclitus, “The only thing constant is …

Navigating gender-affirming care: Pediatricians’ perspective on open discussions and societal fears

Anonymous

Physician

June 12, 2023

“We fear that CPS is going to take them away,” the mother of my patient chokes with tears. My patient on the inpatient pediatric wards looks at me with guarded eyes. I can still see the markings on their neck where they tried to strangle themselves. They were intubated in the pediatric ICU. This transgender patient and their family have gone through a living hell only to come out again …

Unmasking the hidden mental health struggles of professionals: Breaking the silence for empowerment and healing

Tomi Mitchell, MD

Physician

June 12, 2023

In the fast-paced and demanding world we live in, professionals often face immense pressure to portray strength, competence, and unwavering resilience. However, beneath the surface, many individuals silently battle their own mental health challenges. According to CDC, more than 1 in 5 U.S. adults live with a mental illness.

One of the most difficult hurdles to overcome is the fear of admitting our struggles to others. In this compassionate article, …

How an emergency physician’s knowledge and confidence save lives in high-stakes situations

Veronica Bonales, MD

Physician

June 12, 2023

I think that from time to time, everyone has had the feeling that they weren’t doing their best. Maybe something we did wasn’t the right thing at the time. Perhaps we should have thought about it longer or acted sooner. We often second-guess the decisions we make, whether they involve matters of love, career, finances, child-rearing, or even where to meet the in-laws for dinner.

While I can do that in …

Awakening the dormant elements of humanity

Johnathan Yao, MD, MPH

Physician

June 11, 2023

When I was first paged about Mr. P, I braced myself for the worst. He had already had three “code greys” called—the hospital code for aggressive behavior. When we met him on his hospital bed, he was bound by restraints on his wrists and ankles to protect the staff. He was admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) for alcohol withdrawal, though the medications used to treat his condition had …

Physician excellence: Transitioning from the comfort zone to the growth zone for exceptional patient care

Harvey Castro, MD, MBA

Physician

June 10, 2023

Health care is a dynamic, evolving field that demands a high degree of adaptability and a commitment to lifelong learning from its practitioners. For physicians, improving patient care is often about the challenge of moving from a comfort zone – a place of established practices and familiar routines – to a growth zone, where they are constantly learning, adapting, and expanding their skill sets. This shift is about staying up-to-date …

How excessively regulating doctors can harm patients

Richard Gunderman, MD, PhD and James Lynch, MD

Physician

June 9, 2023

According to the American Board of Medical Specialties, its program for maintenance of certification (MOC) serves the patients, families, and communities of the United States and improves patient care by establishing high standards for ongoing learning, practice improvement, and assessment activities. Whether this is true or not has been a hotly contested topic in the medical profession for about two decades, when MOC was first introduced. Proponents claim that MOC …

The alarming epidemic of physician burnout and how we can combat it

Tomi Mitchell, MD

Physician

June 8, 2023

Physician burnout is not a new issue, but it has become increasingly prevalent in recent years. According to the Medscape’s 2023 survey, 53 percent of physicians say they are burned out, compared to 42 percent in 2018.

Burnout among doctors can have disastrous consequences for individuals and society at large. Burnout can lead to reduced productivity, lower quality of care, and even medical errors. It affects not only the physician’s …

A retired physician’s battle with moral injury

Hayward Zwerling, MD

Physician

June 8, 2023

I retired early from the profession I loved because the devolution of the health care system had made it impossible for me to care for my patients in a manner that met my standards. It also left me with a wound of “moral injury” which makes me leery of re-engaging with our health care system.

My early career

My first post-training job (1989) as a physician was in a BCBS clinic. After …

Unveiling the secrets to effective resuscitation and overcoming obstacles

Deepak Gupta, MD

Physician

June 8, 2023

Whether one is resuscitating or being resuscitated, the call for help is a cry for help. However, constructive help may be hard to come by and thus harder to let go.

When one is resuscitating or being resuscitated, the scenario may often be that they are or have been driving under the influence of tunnel vision, thus being blindsided by situational incompetence induced by it. Just like the best-case scenario for …

A tense family drama unfolds as a young daughter pursues unconventional career path

Osmund Agbo, MD

Physician

June 7, 2023

You may not have heard about the young girl from my neck of the woods who just graduated from high school and is heading to college in Arizona to study ichthyology. It’s been causing quite a stir because her father, a family medicine doc who runs a busy practice in town, is less than thrilled about her daughter’s chosen career path. The tension between father and daughter is palpable, and …

Decoding the brain’s decision-making: insights for medical professions and strategies for success

Harvey Castro, MD, MBA

Physician

June 7, 2023

The interplay between the brain’s fast and deliberative decision-making systems is complex yet fascinating, shedding light on the cognitive underpinnings of different medical professions, such as emergency room (ER) doctors and radiologists.

Let’s illustrate this with an example. Consider an ER doctor faced with a patient exhibiting symptoms of a heart attack—chest pain, shortness of breath, and cold sweat. The physician must rapidly recognize these symptoms, immediately initiate protocols, administer clot-dissolving …

Unmasking the truth: the shocking reality of the opioid epidemic and who’s really to blame

Jay K. Joshi, MD

Physician

June 7, 2023

An excerpt from Burden of Pain: A Physician’s Journey through the Opioid Epidemic.

Glide your hand over a piece of velvet and you notice the smoothness. You feel its aggregated smoothness, not the individualized roughness of each fiber. Each fleeting fiber, a prick of truth, is nullified, synthesized, and then magnified into the silky fluency of general perception—propaganda containing within it a concoction of ambiguities and assumptions, cooked with a …

Discover your true north: Navigating life’s confusions and embracing your path to success

Tyler Jorgensen, MD

Physician

June 7, 2023

At age 18, my buddy David and I scaled the outside stucco of a hotel in Cancun, Mexico, and soon found ourselves ten stories up, lying on our backs on the hotel roof, looking at the night sky. It was a terribly stupid idea—one of many we had back in those days. But once we were up there, David taught me the major stars and constellations of the summer sky: …

Revealing America’s expansion: the dark truth of Native American suffering and unjustified abuses

Anonymous

Physician

June 6, 2023

It is nearly universally agreed that the United States of America is a “great nation” with the world’s strongest economy, an expansive international presence, and being physically one of the largest countries in the world. The groundwork for this expansion, both in size and economically, was grounded in our concept of “manifest destiny” – the belief that as a nation, we were intended to span from ocean to ocean. For …

From journalism to medicine: Unveiling the untold stories of patients’ medical conditions

Veronica Bonales, MD

Physician

June 6, 2023

Doctors come from different backgrounds, and we all start medical school with various life experiences. Few people know that I actually started off life as a journalism major. I wanted to write about other people and their life stories. I wanted to travel and photograph what the world had to offer. Then, having lost my journalism job and getting hired at a nursing home as a receptionist, I ended up …

A mentor’s legacy in medicine, leadership, and embracing evidence-based care

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Physician

June 5, 2023

As a graduate of Temple University’s medical school and psychiatric residency program, and as a current faculty member, I had the good fortune of studying under highly respected physicians who served not only as chairpersons, but also as presidents, CEOs, and chief medical officers. Anthony (Tony) F. Panzetta, MD, was one of them. Panzetta passed away in 2021 at age 87. As with all great mentors, he had multifaceted talents …

Breaking free from restrictive covenants to combat burnout

Raya E. Kheirbek, MD

Physician

June 5, 2023

Hospitals have the duty to ensure that their physicians are professionally content, both physically and mentally to provide the highest quality of care. But they also have a responsibility to prevent physicians from leaving work for competing institutions. The paradox between the use of restrictive covenants in physicians’ contracts and hospitals’ concerns about physician wellness arises from a tension between two important objectives.

Restrictive covenants, which are clauses in contracts that …

From medical student to intern: Discovering a deeper connection with patients

Johnathan Yao, MD, MPH

Physician

June 4, 2023

As a medical student with a limited knowledge base and limited exposure to taking care of a high volume of patients, my idea of being the physician I hoped to be involved in spending time at the bedside and really getting to know my patients as people and hearing their stories. As I was learning my way around how the medical world worked as clerkship student, this was perhaps the …

A physician’s typical day, as envisioned by a non-clinician health care MBA: a satire

Jennifer Lycette, MD

Physician

June 4, 2023

My alarm goes off at 3:30 a.m. for some early charting. I love these pre-work hours, even though it’s my own unpaid time. I went into debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars to have the need for sleep trained out of me. A neat side effect of this is that it also wiped away my will to resist inane admin tasks.

While I’m pre-charting, my family wakes up, or at …