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.
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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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“My wife is a urogynecologist lucky enough to get through her seven years of residency plus fellowship with “only” $124,000 of student debt. When we discussed how we were going to get rid of this debt, she had always assumed that it was …
Medical school loan repayment tips [PODCAST]
An excerpt from Pluck: Lessons We Learned for Improving Healthcare and the World, published by Silicon Valley Press.
We met Joseph S. Murtaugh, our new chief at the National Institutes of Health, for the first time on July 3, 1967. He sat behind his desk, looking every bit like …
Medical advances can often stir up ethical issues
KevinMD contributors, virtually without exception, have asserted the solution to events like the horrific tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, is “gun control.” Allow me to present an alternative viewpoint in the interest of diversity of opinion.
First of all, I favor reasonable gun restriction laws. But sadly, I don’t think that will solve the problem. Look at the city of Chicago. It has one of the strictest laws on gun control in …
Gun control vs. violent criminal control
In the wake of medical home certification, meaningful use, the Cures Act, and the pandemic, it’s clear that virtually all health care is now built on a digital foundation. EHRs are pervasive in the delivery system and are increasingly connected to practice management software, virtual visit, mobile capabilities, health information exchanges, and population health platforms. As we consider the criticality of interoperability throughout this evolving digital ecosystem, I’m moved to …
The “wonder years” of health care
“For many health care professionals, the stresses of their roles routinely take a heavy toll on their mental and physical well-being. It did for me. The pandemic and the unprecedented loss of life were more overwhelming than any of us could have imagined, and for some, it simply pushed them over …
New legislation addresses health care professionals’ mental health needs [PODCAST]
When most health care professionals hear the word “malpractice,” they want to run the other way. This is understandable—but also a missed opportunity. We can leverage malpractice data to target and drive investment in patient safety efforts. Malpractice data shows us that good communication and teamwork are vital to preventing adverse events and malpractice claims—while dramatically improving working conditions and enhancing patient safety.
Malpractice data shows that communication-related factors contribute to …
Malpractice may be negative, but its data can generate positive results
A friend called me for medical advice two weeks ago. He’s single, in his 30s and generally healthy, but he’d developed a dry cough with mild congestion. After a self-administered COVID-19 test turned up negative results, he remained suspicious he could be infected.
He was set to fly west in a couple of days for a conference and dreaded the thought of infecting other passengers. I recommended a PCR test if …
Get ready for a COVID culture shock
Mental health disorders are by far the largest cause of disability in the world. More money is spent on mental health than either diabetes or cardiovascular disease. About 45 million people in the U.S. have a mental illness. Almost every American will, at some point or another, face a mental health challenge. It may be related to depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse or maybe something more circumstantial like grief …
How to fix the psychiatrist shortage in the U.S.
“Teaching medical students entrepreneurial and business skills is invaluable as the need for leadership in medicine grows in every single sector. Many physicians already engage in managerial and entrepreneurial-like practices without labeling these skills. By formalizing these skills into medical education, physicians will be able to take their ambitions and ideas …
Physicians need to be trained as entrepreneurs and encouraged to innovate [PODCAST]
Every primary care doctor knows what we are up against. The obstacles are many: payers, licensing boards, MOC, CME requirements, coding for billing, access issues, and the changing clinical field.
Sometimes these cause real harm.
Fifty miles north of where I-95 ends in Maine, winters there are long. My friend Dr. J did locums and spent a winter there. He tries new things wherever he goes, like spearfishing on Maui. So he …
Boards should protect the public, not destroy doctors
Five days before this story begins, where everything is upside down, and the end is the beginning.
Me, standing in my PICU, slowly approaching that cradle, then removing the medication, one by one, turning off the syringe pumps. Saying out loud the number of milliliters passed, where that line is trapped, that little division between the professional and me, the person.
Where I stopped being a doctor and became a woman holding …
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