Several years ago, I wrote a piece about my experience of personal grief while working as an emergency physician in Australia. The grief I experienced was due to the untimely death of my older brother Martin — a high-achieving lawyer and sportsman — who slowly withered away as he lost his battle with a rare and aggressive lymphoma. It is fair to say that his death broke me, but …
“Mr. Stenson left AMA …”
“Why?” I said out loud to my attending.
“He left with his IVs in …” said his nurse in disbelief.
An hour earlier, before rounds, I sat down with Mr. S to talk about his anxiety attack.
Ten years ago, he was shot ten times in the chest, which left him with PTSD and depression. Not long after, he started having unprovoked panic attacks. What started as once or …
In my self-righteous youth, I bristled at the thought of physicians unionizing. Certain our collective altruism and professionalism would prevail. Unions were for oppressed laborers, not well-regarded, well-paid professionals. Reading the recent paper in JAMA and 30-plus years in the field have caused me to think again. That, and recently having provided support to a young physician couple with a newborn.
There is nothing quite as messy, all-consuming, and awe-inspiring as …
“You’re dying.”
I can often visualize the impact of my words as soon as they leave my mouth, the heavy weight sinking into the mind and body of my patient as they sit in the stark white hospital bed.
It usually isn’t the first time they’ve heard the sentiment. After all, we tell them countless times in different phrases we use as physicians, expecting them to understand, but none quite as precise …
I am a pulmonary-critical care medicine physician. I had a medical issue in 2020 and was on limited call responsibilities. When I came back, it was in the throes of the first wave of COVID.
It goes without saying that the last three years or so have been very difficult for everyone in the medical profession. We lost a truly horrific number of patients to COVID — in the early days, …
The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a profound toll on older adults, isolating them physically and emotionally from their communities and families. Mental health has suffered across generations and, as a practicing geriatric psychiatrist, I have had a front-row seat to the unique conditions older adult populations are facing. Despite rising rates of depression and anxiety, infection control measures have accelerated the adoption of digital health, including telehealth, opening myriad new …
How much medical uncertainty can you tolerate? Most patients have not given much thought to this consequential issue, but it hovers over them in their doctors’ offices. This is also an issue for medical professionals. Indeed, how both sides in the doctor-patient relationship navigate this will be instrumental in choosing the path forward.
Medicine is not mathematics. It’s a murky discipline with incomplete data and moving targets. Many of your symptoms …
More than two months after he died, his name still adorned the whiteboard of the hospital room he inhabited. As I stood there and gazed, recalling the memories he left me with, the nurse who tended to him entered the room and started to cry. Her love for Eric, she told me, did not enable her to erase his name.
He was disheveled, non-compliant, and plagued with multiple morbidities when first …
Your plane is about to take off. Like most folks, you are just a little anxious about flying. It is very rare, but you know a lot of bad things can happen to the machine that carries you at 30,000 feet above sea level. Consider this: Would you rather the mechanic who inspects your aircraft be absolutely conscientious to every minute detail, be exquisitely perfectionistic in his examination of the …
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“Companies that embrace digital processes will reap the rewards, as shown by the Forrester survey taken in 2020 after the pandemic began. The survey found that digital document processes were helping organizations maintain their business resilience and …
An excerpt from The Pain Solution: 5 Steps to Relieve and Prevent Back Pain, Muscle Pain, and Joint Pain without Medication.
In a one-year period, more than 54 percent of Americans report musculoskeletal pain, including arthritis pain, low back pain, and neck pain. The search for …
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The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting shutdown accelerated the adoption of decentralized clinical trials (DCTs). The number of trials with virtual and/or decentralized elements exceeded 1,000 in 2021 for the first time, according to GlobalData. That’s a 50 percent increase from 2020. GlobalData expects the number of site-less and/or virtual clinical trials to jump another 28 percent this year, potentially topping 1,400.
This presents a perfect opportunity for smaller and …
The monkeypox outbreak continues to accelerate worldwide; by some counts, the U.S. now harbors the most significant number of currently known cases. Pathways for the initial spread beyond endemic areas for this current worldwide outbreak are thus far unclear but may be at least in part related to international infected passenger travel. Now, with elevating case counts, there remains an increased risk of infected persons spreading disease …
The COVID-19 pandemic has uprooted our lives, tilting them into imbalance and oftentimes severing our individual sense of inner peace. The newfound public initiative to combat these paralyzing challenges is welcome, especially to me. I’ve coped with major depression for as long as I can remember.
The grinding pursuit of my own inner peace led me to medical school. Medical training, I expected, would make a healer out of me, able …
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A hallmark of modern medicine involves providing compassionate care through an empathetic doctor-patient relationship. This post describes one powerful technique for developing empathy among medical providers: narrative medicine writing.
What is empathy?
A basic definition of empathy involves your ability to understand someone else’s perspective by putting yourself in their (metaphorical) shoes. Empathy can involve cognitive aspects (i.e., understanding why a person is feeling sad or happy) or emotional aspects (i.e., sharing …
Have you ever felt as if your doctor wasn’t really listening to you or was just rushing through your appointment? Have you ever felt as if your doctor didn’t understand the pain you were in or didn’t take it seriously?
Most health care providers are evaluated based on the experience their patients had, and their payment is often based on those patient experience scores. A major component of patient …
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At her Supreme Court confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson recounted a story from her time as a college undergraduate. She recalled being a freshman at Harvard after having attended public school in Miami, Florida, and her transition to life at the university had been challenging, causing her to question if she belonged at the school and if she could succeed. She was …
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