An excerpt from The Empathy Academy.
It might be tempting to choose an easier path, Monty thought, but amid the stress, pain, and tragedy, there were also triumphs: A patient’s seizures stop. A CT scan is clear. He remembered resuscitating Mrs. Caldwell and feeling a wave of relief upon …
“Their absence makes me feel sad,
I look around at my peers, envious and curious,
Obsessing over when they will show up.
When they do, they never seem to live up to expectations,
Too small, too uneven, but what’s sure is it’s a sign I’m no longer a child.
It adds to my wardrobe …
Over coffee each morning, I quickly skim the headlines on my laptop before heading to work. It is Washington winter, it is dark outside, and the headlines in health care news are grim. Health care workers are burned out. Doctors are working hard all day and coming home to find scathing reviews on online rating sites. Some have their compensation tied to the results of patient surveys. Patients are trusting …
I entered my Manhattan apartment around midnight, roughly an hour after observing a transplant team recover kidneys and a liver from a young patient newly pronounced dead. Still wearing scrubs, I sat down on my bed, and, like a ghostly twin or guardian angel, watched myself spill tears.
The scene I witnessed in the operating room that evening as a second-year medical student was at once grotesque and hallowed, shocking and …
On March 10, I had the distinct privilege of presenting to the ONC Health IT Advisory Committee at their meeting titled “Health Equity by Design.” The presentation highlighted five areas of focus for health IT in reducing health disparities: health equity data collection, actionable analysis of the data, integration of health care and social service providers, the special role that health information exchanges (HIEs) can play, and access to health …
While the mental illness patient is afflicted by very real and painful feelings, these feelings are internal and not visible to others. The indications of the condition then, whether those of depression, anxiety, or even hallucinations, can be said to be invisible to observers — family, doctor, etc. — in fact, to everyone other than that individual sufferer of mental illness.
A constellation of signs and symptoms is often used to …
“I understand that the biggest fear you have about going through chemotherapy is losing your hair. I just want to tell you. You will be fine. Trust me.
I know it’s barbaric. Why don’t we have medicines to treat cancer that will not make you lose your hair in this …
To spend an entire college year (two semesters) studying epistemology seemed like a colossal waste of time when I was 19. We had no choice; we had to take it, and I got a pretty good mark, as I recall. It took a half year to find out what it was about, but it seemed to concern itself with how we obtain knowledge. There is inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning …
January 24, 2014, was a typical day for me, spent hurrying up and down the halls outside the operating rooms at the hospital where I was an attending anesthesiologist. I often “ran the board” or was the charge person, and I enjoyed being the facilitator. Each operation was written on a magnetic strip and we moved them around like pieces of a puzzle to get the surgeries done efficiently. I …
The medical establishment has made wonderful strides in destigmatizing psychiatric disorders. However, we have helped to create a devastating stigmatization of emotional distress. Somehow, as it has become acceptable to suffer from a psychiatric illness, it has become increasingly unacceptable to suffer from emotional distress and the current medical practice has nurtured this change.
We have simply and overwhelmingly lost touch with the human aspect of medicine. When someone is in …
“Our patients go through some very predictable fears and responses to illness and injury. In turn, medical students and residents also think and respond with some thought distortions and misunderstandings about their patients and themselves. Armed with awareness and familiarity with the typical patterns, we learn more about what …
I’m an RN and clinical informaticist. When I was studying health care informatics, I learned about physician resistance. The idea is that physicians are uniquely resistant to EHRs and health care information technology (HIT) apps. If only they went to more training or spent more of their limited time customizing their preferences, they would get the benefits of the EHR. For years, I believed this to be true.
Yet, I had …
For many of us, the term self-care is synonymous with self-indulgence. I used to think so too. Our thoughts immediately race towards behavior requiring us to take time away from our loved ones or shortchange them of our responsibilities.
As a child, I looked to my parents as prime role models. They were first-generation immigrants from Iran who were trying to uphold their …
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Have you ever really appreciated the silence? The true silence that transports you to the root of it all. Our lives are a perpetual hamster wheel, chasing aspirations with underlying motivations that I often don’t completely understand. Good intentions and acts of kindness, seemingly altruistic, have hidden motivations of affirmation or appreciation. Why do you do what you do? It seems so obvious on the surface, but like an onion …
“Overall, the health system in the United States is still not tilting its axes in favor of either primary care or family doctor. What is worse, family doctors as a collective are more balkanized and less cohesive than ever. There is a sense among those in the field that …
While everyone faces some risk of experiencing a delayed diagnosis or misdiagnosis, some studies have found that the problem is more common for women. Women are 50 percent more likely than men to receive an incorrect diagnosis when they’re having a heart attack and nearly 30 percent more likely to receive an incorrect diagnosis for stroke. They are also diagnosed with cancer more than two years later …
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So here I am. I just finished updating my CV so I can apply for associate professor this fall.
And I hadn’t touched it since last year. It needed a lot of work.
I look at this, and I think, “Wow.”
And then I also think: What about all the “stuff” that’s not on there?
The difficult pregnancies.
My son’s struggles his first 36 months of life.
My husband’s year-long deployment as a new mother of …
We all need hope. It is powerful and its absence is devastating. Hope allows us to move forward and to dream. Over decades of practice, I have found it to be the most powerful medication I can give a patient.
When we dispense hope, we must be as honest as we are with any treatment. False hope must be vigorously avoided. It is lying. In giving false hope, we might deprive …
“Our children are not OK. Our pediatricians are not OK. Please, let us not further ignore and jeopardize the future health of our society. Pediatrics needs a transformational change to direct primary care and other models that transition from transactional care to relational care. Encourage your employer to embrace …
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What is it about the documentation of patient encounters that is so aggravating? I was ecstatic to be part of the generation that entered the computer age in medicine. The first day I opened a chart on a pull-down menu within a pixelated screen I felt like I was ushering in the future. We would be able to mine charts for clinical gold!
As a clinician, I value the …
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