You’ve been swallowing things your entire life: breast milk (or formula), food––maybe a marble or small Lego. But did you know that swallowing pills is different?
Let’s start with how not to swallow a pill.
Sorry, but Bruce Willis in all five Die Hard movies is incorrect. You don’t just take a small handful of aspirin, toss them into your mouth, and jerk your head back while swallowing.
Not to mention, if you have …
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“It has now been almost four years since I transitioned to academia. I see fewer patients per day and take fewer call. I also have more time with each patient, more time to recharge, more time for …
Toughness is not defined by a dollar amount [PODCAST]
In my recent TEDx Talk titled, Why Black Patients Don’t Trust the Healthcare System, I explored racially-based medical algorithms and their impact on health outcomes for Black patients. As a physician, I believe such algorithms have no place in the modern healthcare system, as they can affect how Black patients are diagnosed and the morbidity and mortality rates in the community.
A study published as recently …
Ensuring equitable, quality treatment of pain in Black and marginalized people
The pandemic has brutalized health care such that the term “institutional betrayal” (IB) is becoming part of the physician vernacular. This cringe-worthy term is being used to point a finger of shame at health care leaders and systems who presumably are failing to support and protect their workers adequately.
Indeed, we depend on our employers for our safety and well-being. With staffing shortages, lack of supplies and lower revenue, employees bear …
Institutional betrayal vs. courage
The Oxford dictionary defines insidious as “proceeding in a gradual, subtle way but with harmful effects.” Most people associate this term with clever criminals. I am writing this to ask you to think about it in another way.
Perhaps the greatest joy a person can experience is welcoming a child into the world with so many dreams and visions for the future. Ideally, those dreams come true. But not always. Sometimes …
Doctors: Dig deeper when children can’t gain weight
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“Doing medical-legal consulting is a great way to use your medical training in a non-clinical field that really helps people. One of the many things we can do is help attorneys refute the question of a pre-existing …
How a medical-legal consultant refuted a pre-existing medical condition argument [PODCAST]
According to Psychology Today, wokeism is defined as a system of thought and behavior characterized by intolerance, policing the speech of others and proving one’s own superiority by denouncing others.
In a September 2, 2022, article in the New York Post titled, “Top med school putting wokeism ahead of giving America good doctors,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb and Laura Morgan shed light on recent efforts to allow wokeism to infiltrate the …
Medical school admissions: wokeism vs. the Bible
Symptoms of burnout that are plaguing physicians and society include feelings of cynicism, apathy, depersonalization, and fatigue. These are associated with anxiety, depression, and suicide. In fact, more than 400 physicians each year die by suicide.
So much is written about the causes and what can be done to change these statistics. Whether it’s from the leadership standpoint, the autonomy of physicians, the burdens insurance places on physicians and their practices, …
Color is often used as a metaphor for personality and emotion. Terms like “red in the face,” “feeling blue,” and “green with envy” are etched in the vernacular. Great leadership requires emotional intelligence, and the best leaders lead in full color.
Colorful leadership is about seeing the whole picture, unfiltered by our own preferences and experiences. Colorful leaders have been depicted in books, movies, and songs. The “flower exercise” …
Medical leaders must show their true colors
This article is sponsored by Mental Health Technologies (MHT), a cloud-based platform that enables health care providers to screen and measure mental health and substance abuse disorders.
Mental Health Technologies (MHT) brings much-needed technological innovation to a space in desperate need …
Mental Health Technologies: Revolutionizing technology within the behavior health care field
Here are tips you can borrow to write concise notes. While keeping them clear and thorough. And spending less time on EMR documentation.
Don’t write paragraphs. You’re not writing a novel. Think bullet lists. They are easier to read.
Cut on pronouns. This is useful when using templates and dot phrases: You don’t need to replace all pronouns.
Use abbreviations. Medical …
How to write shorter clinical notes
It’s never too early – or too late – to create a career that’s your own. It’s always the right time to keep the door open to learning, to try your best, and to allow yourself to grow through experience and time.
Over the last four decades of my career, I’ve learned a lot. And now, as I’m about to retire, I find myself reflecting. I’ve been a pediatrician and started …
3 pieces of advice to create a meaningful career
As a caregiver or support person for an older parent, partner, or relative, you may be involved in helping that person with medical appointments, perhaps even helping them manage care from several different health care providers. There are a number of strategies that can help you be an effective, respectful advocate for your loved one. These strategies also help ensure that your family member gets the care she or he …
Caregiver? Learn how to support older relatives at doctor’s appointments.
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Jay Baruch is an emergency physician and author of Tornado of Life: A Doctor’s Journey Through Constraints and Creativity in the ER.
We discuss his emergency …
A doctor’s journey through constraints and creativity in the ER [PODCAST]
“We use a punishment mindset that exacerbates the trauma (people have already suffered). We have to change that.”
– Bryan Stevenson, Director of the Equal Justice Initiative
In the months preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, our quality improvement team was discussing the safety of providers and staff on a weekly basis. This was not in the context of a communicable disease or sufficient personal protective equipment but instead related to another insidious health …
Breaking the cycle of violence in hospitals: the role of trauma-informed care
When I think of Big Joe, I see his overalls and how he filled them. And how a couple of months after I operated on him, there was room for both of us in there. Big Joe: farmer, salt of the earth, tough, stoic. And now, bright orange. My initial recommendation, while probably justified, damn near killed him. Big Joe hadn’t been sick a day in his life. He worked …
Big Joe: living proof of a surgeon’s fallibility
Paula came to my office on a Monday afternoon, a few months after burying her husband. She and John had been inseparable. They were both my patients, so I knew John had spent the last six months battling lung cancer. They had been married forty-five years when John died. I sincerely offered Paula my condolences on that Monday afternoon. I could tell she was in pain and shared how she …
Not listening carefully to a vulnerable patient can become a matter of life or death
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“It is impossible to fix a system with an unwillingness to bend. It means working together to accomplish a goal.
Living in the gray requires a commitment to growth and discomfort. In the gray, it is possible to …
Protect Black women’s maternal health [PODCAST]
Once again, it’s time to consider universal health care. What are the implications? Could it happen?
After something of a hiatus during the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the battles over its implementation, legislative committees in Oregon and Washington are looking at new proposals for state-based universal health care. Oregon’s task force report was completed in September, while Washington’s “baseline report” was finished this month.
While there’s a fair amount …
New proposals for universal health care in Oregon and Washington
“Are you analyzing me?”
Psychiatrists become acclimated to this question being launched by anyone to whom we are brave enough to disclose our occupation. Mental health stigma persists, and psychiatrist jokes are part of that legacy. All humor holds some truth, and this joke reflects discomfort around the mystique of psychiatry. How does it actually work? What do psychiatrists actually do to heal people? How do you know when a psychiatrist …
Coaching vs. therapy: A physician coach and psychiatrist explains
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