Self-compassion does not make you soft. Boundaries do not make you closed off or selfish.
I had to repeat this many times before I started to understand how true and how essential self-compassion and boundaries are in our lives.
I did not realize how much I maintained my resistance to these ideas until Dr. Brené Brown provided her research findings at a conference held in Houston this year. Dr. Brown shared her …
A 23-year-old girl reached out to me, a medical professional, seeking advice. “I’m not afraid of them killing me,” she said, referring to the torture and rape that men and women endure in Iranian prisons. “What I’m afraid of is what they’ll do to me in captivity. What pill can I take to end it [if I’m caught at the protests]?” As a physician, my oath is to save lives, …
The luridness of it made me feel like the female lead in a bad Lifetime movie. The person whom I trusted most was a monster: an affair with a middle-aged prostitute who verbally abused me, an Ashley Madison account, and countless payments to sex workers – those were the tip of the repulsive iceberg that was my relationship.
And sadly, these were the least of my problems. My once-kind then-partner’s face …
Our health care employees are suffering from the after-effects of COVID, the great resignation, stripped-down staffing levels, and the misrepresentation of human clinicians as factory floor machines. When frontline employees and senior managers are depleted, C-suite executive leaders become depleted too. And depleted leaders are at heightened risk of burnout.
When struggling with burnout, executive leaders tend to get caught up in reactivity patterns that profoundly affect employee workplace satisfaction, engagement, …
I still remember the exhilaration I felt upon learning that my peers and I could finally return to our in-person classrooms. After a year of Zoom lectures, asynchronous exams, and more, the prospect of seeing each other again thrilled us.
However, we had not anticipated the constant fear and uncertainty that would accompany this transition. Despite implementing safety measures like masking and one-way hallways, the number of COVID-19 cases continued to …
The senior medical student is hours into her on-call shift on her surgical rotation. She’s been up since four, exhausted, and can’t remember if she had eaten anything since breakfast. The staff surgeon on call “pimps” her on surgical anatomy, pointing at the various arteries and veins in the patient lying in front of them on the operating table. The student has difficulty remembering the various arteries and nerves while …
One summer a few years ago, I went to pick my son up from camp. He was attending a week-long specialty day camp where the kids spent a week with an expert in some area of interest. The camp offered everything from basketball, soccer, and tennis to acting, magic, and chess. It was the first time I was going to pick him up, and I wasn’t exactly sure where to …
My grandma went to her grave with no teeth. I made a full denture for my dad as a dental student. But you can take your natural teeth to your grave. Just before last Halloween, there was a sign near the elevator on my floor in my building in Greenwich Village asking the tenants to check a box if they welcome trick-or-treaters. That means our willingness to give children cavity-causing …
My friend texted me the other day that she was thinking of quitting her training program.
Some schedule changes earlier in the year led to her being scheduled for back-to-back month-long night float rotations. She was in the middle of her second straight month of nights and was feeling tired, depressed, and burned out.
Now, this might be a unique situation since night float rotations, on average, are only one to two …
Health care is growing hard to come by in rural America.
Three-quarters of rural counties suffer from doctor shortages. More than 200 rural hospitals are at risk of closing due to financial hardship within the next two to three years, according to a study published this spring. And while 20% of the U.S. population lives in a rural region, just 10% of physicians practice in these communities.
Fortunately, there’s a group of …
“To serve the art of medicine as it should be served, one must love his fellow man.”
– William Osler
There is sadness in my heart and my mind. With so many advances in the treatment of illnesses of the mind and body, why have we let our diseased health care system go untreated?
Hospitals in rural areas are being closed down and deemed non-profitable, forcing their patients to seek alternatives; those alternatives …
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On this special episode, I’m on the other side of the microphone. It’s an honor to be interviewed by Cory Calendine, MD, an orthopedic surgeon with a tremendous social media presence. Visit him on Instagram …
If my grandfather were alive, he would be the same age as Mr. Hendricks. Seventy-eight years old. That’s why when I first met him, he introduced himself as John, but I preferred to call him Mr. Hendricks. That’s how I was taught as one of the ways to give respect to the elderly. The “American” way is to call someone by their first name if you have some level of …
My social media feed has increasingly included stories of friends “quiet quitting.” A term popularized through TikTok, quiet quitting is a reaction to the exploitation of employee labor without providing additional compensation. Simultaneously, my IRL conversations have been filled with stories of the Great Resignation, in which employees have voluntarily resigned, often without other employment secured. A recent report by the U.S. Surgeon General recognized the problem of workplace …
I see there has been yet another measles outbreak; at the time of writing, the count is 59 in central Ohio. All are either unvaccinated or not fully vaccinated. No doubt local pediatricians are being flooded with worried parents proffering their offspring for viewing with the statement, “Could this rash be measles, doctor?”
This certainly happened to me in 2019 when doing some primary care practice. That year experienced a massive …
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“EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy kicked off my personal transformation from a self-absorbed workaholic in an industry of (what I now view as) questionable merit into a human being making a positive contribution to the …
It has finally happened, I have transitioned to viewing myself as a widget, a depersonalized interface between the EMR and the patient. I am the unnamed device that collects the patient data and subsequently transcribes it into prose for billing purposes and maybe the occasional colleague review. There is a bit of curious comfort in identifying myself as a mere cog. I’m imagining I will now fly below the radar, …
Oh how I miss the feel of your thick spine, so wide I could barely grasp you with my oddly small hands. Wrist cocked, an awkward drag ensued from rack to desk, your heft landing with a thump under fluorescent lights on the laminate desk. I scooted into the low chair and dove in with aplomb. I was ready.
I started just beneath your mauve plastic cover. There, just under the …
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