Medical students are an odd bunch. At least in my day. Warning: The following may seem a little distasteful, violating the doctrine of proper decorum expected of medical professionals. I feel your anguish for those bent to the more sensitive side, but to sugar-coat a narrative only robs it of its essence.
I attended the Medical College of Wisconsin in the late 1980s, so what follows may not represent medical training. …
When I was a child, I recall my mother telling me that to live a successful life, you must do one thing every day that scares you. I remember not fully understanding this piece of advice’s magnitude or real significance, yet it still resonated. It’s funny, what stands out to us, what we remember, and why. Little did I know at the time that these words represented the very premise …
“It was a cold night in October …”
I can now joke about that night with my husband and my best friend from OB/GYN residency. I had worked a Saturday 24-hour call shift, and as soon as I got home on Sunday morning, I began having symptoms that made me turn around and head right back to the labor and delivery unit …
When we talk about health disparities, we talk about socially disadvantaged populations. The disadvantages can be defined locally if we are talking about local communities, regionally if we are talking about regional populations, nationally if we are talking about national residents, and globally if we are talking about global humans. Local, regional, national, and global economic disparities may define corresponding health disparities.
One among economic disparities can be technology disparities during …
Leading an organization from a culture of bullying or blaming to a culture of safety is a daunting initiative. Unhealthy alignments are deeply embedded in toxic cultures, and informal power dynamics may influence how people behave. Instead of respectful communication where giving and receiving constructive feedback is ongoing, common behaviors include:
All of which perpetuate a cycle of broken trust and poor conduct.
While patients, the workforce, …
You must be thinking, what on Earth can the U.S. health care system learn from a poor, developing country like Nepal? Isn’t the U.S. known across the globe for its latest innovation and advanced procedures? Well, I was thinking the same thing. Until my seven-week trip this summer to rural Nepal. As a Nepali-American Emergency Medical Technician-Basic (EMT-B) studying medicine in the U.S., I learned more than I could imagine …
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“The tech industry needs to invest in developing platforms and devices with active, consistent, and frequent input from the disability community. This input must reflect a range of individuals with disabilities. A variety of identities exist beyond …
An excerpt from Saving Grace: What Patients Teach Their Doctors about Life, Death, and the Balance in Between.
In my third year at LSU Medical School, we dove headfirst into full-time patient care, taking required nine-week rotations on internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, and general surgery. In the fourth year …
A medical malpractice process is a lot like running a marathon.
The analogy makes it easy to understand why physicians are emotionally unready to go through years of litigation and often find themselves struggling.
To successfully make it through the grueling 26.2 miles, a runner has to be well-prepared.
It’s common for runners to join a running group. Sometimes, engage a coach who can help to train smart.
Runners will spend months building up …
Imagine delivering testimony to practicing emergency medicine for 30 years on the TEDx stage and my “Real Serious Illness Conversations with Parents” being condemned with this NOTE FROM TED: Please do not look to this talk as a substitute for health advice. This talk only reflects the speaker’s personal views and beliefs. It’s as if to say, “Beware of the doc”… who lets individuals decide how they’ll die …
For the first time since graduation from medical school, stirred by the courage of my colleagues in the ICUs and emergency rooms during the COVID pandemic, I looked back at the Hippocratic oath to reassess its charge to physicians. My wife and I, both doctors, studied and trained for a long time, and we considered the years spent and the effort put forth to be a calculated sacrifice. But amidst …
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Anyone who has ever practiced yoga knows what that means. Child’s pose. Kneeling with toes untucked. Upper body hinged over the hips with arms outstretched and forehead resting against the mat. Breathing. In and out. In. And. Out. We are told it’s a recovery position, a safe place.
Whenever we are feeling overwhelmed with another position, or even if the position is not just clicking, we can find rest in something …
In recent months, three of the nation’s largest retailers have stirred up a frenzy on Wall Street with a string of high-profile health care deals.
Amazon bought primary-care company One Medical in early August for $3.9 billion. That was a month before CVS spent $8 billion to acquire Signify Health and its network of 10,000 clinicians who make home visits (both virtually and IRL). A day later, Walmart inked a 10-year …
One year ago, I had brain surgery. The surgery was a success, and the hospital stay almost killed me.
I am one in a million; one of the 1 million people in the U.S. diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD), a degenerative neurological disorder that currently has no cure. It is the fastest-growing neurological disorder in the world, with the prevalence Read more…
An excerpt from Absent-Father Syndrome: Overcoming the Trauma of a Fatherless Childhood.
“I’ve sat face to face in front of many adults who were crying their eyes out,” says Rachel Norman, founder of A Mother Far from Home. “They needed healing tools and positive coping mechanisms. They had low self-worth, nonexistent …
I was standing outside the patient room, feeling slightly restless that day. A few days ago, I had just received some news from my doctor that I was not expecting. My mind sifted through the various possibilities and directions this could take me. When will I get to see my doctor to discuss this? What does this mean? As my brain was walking through the various unknowns, my physical body …
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