When it comes to developing healthy habits, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. However, certain habits are particularly effective when working as a physician. These are what we refer to as high-performance habits.
Being a physician is one of the most challenging jobs out there. I know this because I am one. It takes many years of schooling to become a physician. But, it takes even more than that. It takes …
7 high performance habits for physicians
An excerpt from The Paper Tiger Syndrome: How to Liberate Yourself from the Illusion of Fear.
Your Original Blueprint is the part of you that knows abundance is your natural state. It’s the inner voice, which says, I am full. I am satiated. I am content. I am peaceful. …
The body is the gateway to the Original Blueprint
“The tech giants of Silicon Valley – love them or hate them – have put incredible personal technology tools into homes and pockets of our patients and their caregivers. Now, we must activate those instruments for our own sustainability, and for our patients’ benefit.
If the neighborly primary care practice is going …
Primary care’s inevitable reboot [PODCAST]
An excerpt from Cutthroat: A Surgeon’s Fight against Big Government, Corrupt Businessmen, and a Broken Healthcare System.
The media, the business world, insurance companies, and even the government have done an amazing job of portraying doctors as the culprits for the exorbitant costs of health care.
They’ve been able to …
Why does one person respond favorably to lung cancer treatment while another does not?
The answer lies in their DNA.
Just 20 years ago, lung cancer was broadly categorized into two groups: non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and small cell lung cancer (SCLC). Relatively recently, the treatment of NSCLC shifted from chemotherapy as a single treatment option to treatment with precision medicine, which is positively impacting survival rates.
Precision medicine: the rifle vs. shotgun approach to cancer treatment
So-called “evidence-based guidelines” are slowly destroying the practice of medicine, and companies that develop these proprietary guidelines are guilty of conspiring with payers to deny individuals necessary medical treatment.
Guideline developers, health plans, and their benefit managers contend that utilization management (UM) programs based on medically proven guidelines will reduce unwarranted clinical practice variation and improve care quality and cost. But real-world evidence paints an entirely different picture. A recent Read more…
Utilization management is medicine’s great conspiracy theory
This is a complicated answer with a complex history.
The most recent factor contributing to the formula shortage is COVID-19 and the pandemic’s effect on supply chains. With the start of the pandemic, people began stockpiling supplies from toilet paper, bottled water, to formula. Concurrently, birth rates decreased due to fear of the virus and its unknown effects on pregnant patients, fetuses, and newborns. Formula consumption was low, decreasing …
Why is there a formula shortage?
“I had also used arts and crafts previously in my own experience to help with healing. Including the previous year when I had a breast cancer recurrence did many crochet projects and took classes in mosaics making as I navigated from victim to survivor. However, following my catastrophic accident, I didn’t …
Art as a tool to manage pain [PODCAST]
The silence felt heavy on the other end of the phone line. I waited a few seconds, and it dawned on me: He wasn’t ready. This moment, each in our own worlds was a defining point in our journey.
Twenty seconds earlier, I had just shared the following with him, “We are ready for hospice.” But he clearly wasn’t. Or maybe he was and just couldn’t verbalize it. He paused after …
A difficult conversation with my mother’s oncologist
At age 33, I got my first job as an outpatient pediatric attending. With great pay, nice coworkers, and exceedingly better hours than in training, to everyone around me, I had finally “landed.” Soon after I began working, however, I woke up with trepidation every morning, forcing myself to get out of bed.
Why wasn’t I relishing the fruits of my labors? After all this time, I no longer trailed the …
5 reasons physicians are afraid to leave medicine
I recently came across a number for the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline. It took me back to my first pregnancy and postpartum experience.
I belong to a traditional family where there is an expectation of bearing a child after a year of marriage. No one prepares the couple for it. No one talks about any challenges during pregnancy and after the child is born.
It was no different …
Supporting a new mom: my experience and some helpful tips
“In their hearts, her daughters just wanted their mother to make the most of the time she had left. She never made it to the beach or hugged her grandchildren. From diagnosis to death, it was two short months. During those weeks, she waited for test results, went back and forth …
A bad death: the importance of truth-telling at end-of-life [PODCAST]
Day 1. I spent Thursday, my day off, golfing. Friday, I was scheduled to see patients and do surgery on the non-English-speaking mother of a patient I delivered a long time ago (who I didn’t really remember). She remembered me, though, and brought her mother from an hour away to see me. But as I coughed and felt slightly feverish, I realized that I had not felt well …
Chronicles of my COVID isolation
Many providers enter medicine to comfort patients and their loved ones. However, much of what I do doesn’t live up to that intention. In the past few months and particularly the past few weeks, I’ve spent most of my afternoons making little difference in the course of my patients’ hospital stays, and instead of having multiple conversations with the loved ones of these ill patients, providing daily updates, reiterating expectations …
Delivering unpalatable truths in medicine
“It’s time to flip the script on evaluations. How can we shine a light upon the strengths of the wonderful peers we are blessed to work with? How can we amplify their greatness, help them work in their own zone of genius? How can we recognize that we all have different, …
It’s time to flip the script on peer evaluations [PODCAST]
A guest column by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, exclusive to KevinMD.
“I am so ashamed. I am truly sorry to anyone I hurt or offended.”
These were the first words Beverly said when I met her in the preoperative holding area before surgery. She was referring to her recent behavior during an episode of …
Bringing brain health awareness into the operating room
Work dread. Even if you didn’t know it had a name, you know the feeling. It is that sensation in the pit of your stomach when you realize that the start of your workday or workweek is fast approaching, and you don’t want it to come. Sometimes it begins on Sunday afternoon when you want to be enjoying time with your family. Other times, you might find yourself sitting in …
Three years ago, I was a physician in the “traditional” medical system seeing 25 to 28 patients every day. I spent hours writing notes to provide proper documentation for the correct billing code. Often, my time was spent calling insurance companies to justify the appropriateness of my medical care. More and more hours were spent on completing tasks for insurance companies rather than patient care. Like many of my colleagues, …
10 steps to create your direct specialty care clinic
“It is a time to ponder on those essential questions: What is your purpose in life, and how can you follow it? What talents can you share with the world, and what are you grateful for? When we deviate from this true calling, when we deviate from love, from creativity, our …
Burnout is a spiritual crisis [PODCAST]
Facts combat fear
It’s hard to believe the first COVID-19 vaccine was administered in the U.S. only a year and a half ago. Like many others, I welcomed the COVID-19 vaccine as a triumph of global cooperation that leveraged decades of research and a beacon of hope that life could eventually return to normal. Yet I was so surprised the first time a pregnant patient told me …
How to help rewrite the COVID-19 information playbook
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