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“In my medical training, we were taught five ways to treat pain: lifestyle modifications, physical therapy, medications, injections, and surgery. Lifestyle modifications are positive changes in diet, exercise, sleep, and stress levels. This is the first-line treatment for painful inflammation. Yet we tend …
Treating pain without medication [PODCAST]
I had a patient in the ED who reminded me a lot of my grandfather, my Dada. I grew up with my Dada, listening to his stories and learning from his knowledge of the intricate workings of the world. He was a first-generation college student, science lover, world traveler, vice president of a large chemical engineering company and loving husband, father and grandfather.
When I was in high school, he also …
Death is inevitable. Talk about it.
Every year, I celebrate and mourn when I officially left my primary care pediatric practice full of patients and parents that I loved to launch my non-profit, Teach a Kid to Fish.
May 31, 2008, was the last day of my practice. Had I known what I was in for, my future self may have stopped me. But I’m so delighted that possibility didn’t exist.
I’m a vision-oriented person and wanted to …
Creating community solutions for children’s health
“Doctor, it’s taken so long to get this appointment with you!” This is the opening line of so many medical visits, and I find myself constantly apologizing to my patients on behalf of our system. After the pandemic-induced lull in routine medical care, we’re right back where we started—doctors booked for months, patients struggling to get appointments.
The difficulty with access to medical care is endemic to our Read more…
Getting an appointment with primary care is the Achilles’ heel of medicine
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“Very few are talking about workplace bullying, yet many are benefitting from it. It acts contrary to the principles of care at the heart of medicine — and we need to do something about it.
How many physicians have wanted to leave medicine because …
Let’s talk about bullying in medicine [PODCAST]
For a long time, I have known that I do not need Beethoven, Bach, or A. R. Rehman. No offense to these extremely talented artists, but music to my ears will always be hearing the baby’s heartbeat on the doppler, hearing the baby’s first cry. The emotion is indescribable, overwhelming and satisfying.
People enter the medical field for myriad reasons, whether charitable, financial, or just for respect. What medicine signified to …
In the last two years, pharmaceutical companies have become increasingly interested in the possibilities in silico technologies bring to the world’s multi-billion-dollar drug development market. Among the factors that have been reported as drivers of recent interest in what is also known as virtual clinical trials are the COVID-19-related restrictions that began impacting traditional human-based clinical trials in 2020.
In silico drug development utilizes real-world data (RWD), artificial intelligence (AI), computational …
The promise of in silico drug development to improve patient outcomes
It might seem odd to write about what high-weight patients would like when they meet with their doctors. Don’t they want what every patient wants? The answer is yes, but the fact is, they often don’t get it due to implicit anti-fat bias among health professionals.
In my 30-plus years of practice as an eating disorders therapist, I’ve heard the same laments from high-weight clients: Doctors only want to talk about …
5 tips for treating high-weight patients
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“Change is overdue. Physicians who need help for mental health issues or substance use disorders need to get it in a manner that is free of financial and other conflicts of interest. They need to be able to go to …
What doctors need to know about physician health programs [PODCAST]
I have wanted to be a doctor for as long as I can remember. I played hospital with my dolls as a child. I never thought of alternative career paths. I climbed the long, sometimes unbearably steep mountain to reach the top.
I loved clinic medicine for many years. Most days, I still do. Until recently, I had never considered leaving, choosing a different path.
Then, I walked into the clinic and …
Making the decision each day to stay in clinical medicine
A patient, let’s call him Jay, came to me refusing a leg amputation. He had open sores that were necrotic, foul-smelling as if he had been neglected for a long time. At his consultation, he fought with every cell of his being, refusing to lose his leg as his uncle did. He wanted a second opinion on whether or not his foot could be saved.
Traditional insurance-based medicine has …
Direct care with a podiatry twist
From an early age, I shared the soccer field with my younger brother, and later, we shared an orthopedic surgeon when I tore my ACL. I worked hard and excelled at my public STEM high school in New York City. I was also an athletic trainer in high school and college. I fit the classic stereotype of the injured sporty kid going into orthopedic surgery, right?
Not exactly.
Only Read more…
Dear sirs: I am a woman orthopedic surgeon
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“We are in an epidemic of gaslighting in medicine. The best definition I heard of gaslighting is transferring your authority on yourself from you to someone else. We give up our authority on ourselves to everyone else but ourselves. We leave our feelings …
A call to stop overworking [PODCAST]
Change is a mysterious creature. It can be both welcome and unwelcome at the same time. It can make us grow in ways we’ve never imagined and yet bring us to our knees. Ironically, it is one of the few things we are promised.
Learning how to navigate change with some grace has been one of the silver linings of living during a pandemic. We were quickly reminded of how little …
As doctors, we have all been guilty of anchoring bias, which means we put too much weight on the first complaint. When a patient presents to the clinic with a complaint that sounds vaguely like a headache due to a sinus infection, we whip out the script pad and write a script for Augmentin. We tell them to return if they are not better in two days. That latter statement …
Are you guilty of anchoring bias?
“If your shoulder were really injured, that maneuver would make you scream in pain,” he told me confidently.
My husband and I recently established care with a new family doctor. I was frightened and scarred from a long history of medical gaslighting that still tightens my throat whenever I meet a new physician.
Will this doctor believe me? Will he understand?
Years of dismissal made me wary of a new start, but we …
What a lifetime of gaslighting by other doctors feels like
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“I never thought social media hacking would offer such important reminders and lessons, but here we are.
By the way, I am the first to admit that it’s easy to gloss over phrases and lessons because you’ve heard them a million times before, and …
What I learned after being hacked on social media [PODCAST]
By the end of April 2022, nearly 40 percent of the country’s baby formula ran out of stock, leading to a major baby formula shortage in the United States. The plummeting availability of baby formula has left parents and caregivers anxious as they struggle to feed their infants, since roughly 75 percent of babies in the U.S. receive at least some formula …
Why the baby formula shortage happened
On June 1, two doctors, a medical receptionist, and a patient were gunned down in the doctors’ outpatient office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. An investigation revealed that one of the doctors was the intended target — a patient, angry because his pain was not relieved after spinal surgery, decided that the doctor who performed the surgery deserved to die. The other victims were collateral damage.
This event is shocking. It’s frightening that …
Is being a victim a part of being a doctor?
Physicians have terrible technology, but they refuse to recognize high-tech as a medical specialty. They must integrate technology as they do laboratory science.
Physicians are certainly suffering from poorly-designed electronic medical records (EHR), but they are also guilty of wilful blindness in abdicating responsibility for technology in medicine. This must change.
Physicians have a higher suicide rate than post-combat troops in the military. A lot of this is due …
Why doctors are getting their asses kicked by technology
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