It was a Monday two years ago. I was still fresh from coming back from having been out of school from a COVID break. I was no older than 22, and I was in my pediatrics clerkship. I was greener than a freshly watered lawn, and I felt every bit of it. It was one day into this rotation that I met Adam.
He was a 7-year-old boy the size of …
A story of medicine’s stolen children
“I am a woman of history who stands up and tells the truth, irrespective of what other people say. I remember the words of the late Representative John Lewis, ‘Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a …
Black female physicians and the bias against them [PODCAST]
I am definitely getting my daughter vaccinated, and I acknowledge a minimal risk. Here is my reasoning, and perhaps this can help your family decide to get the vaccine for the kids in your family, too.
Coronavirus is going to be with us for a long time — years, decades, probably for the rest of our lives like influenza. It is even widespread in deer now, another reservoir …
Why you should vaccinate your kids
“I am exhausted and sad and disappointed and discouraged.
I am losing faith in humanity. Where is the ‘love your neighbor as yourself’? Where is the willingness to help each other? Where is the solidarity of those first days? Physicians have gone from being heroes to being villains. We have dedicated …
Physicians have gone from being heroes to villains [PODCAST]
In a 1968 episode of Star Trek, Captain Kirk is kidnapped by humanoid aliens, tortured unrelentingly, and shackled to the ceiling by his wrists. Science officer Spock and Dr. McCoy find him disheveled and minimally responsive. They release him from the chains and set him on a nearby table for examination. Dr. McCoy urgently takes out his medical tricorder, a device that can check organ function and …
The exciting future of our physical exam with point-of-care ultrasound
How did we Americans allow health insurers to dictate how physicians practice good medicine? The hypocritic oath says, “Do no harm.” We should not allow insurance company profits to prevent proper care for patients.
Our insurer is now telling our young adult son, a Crohn’s patient (Crohn’s is not yet a curable disease), who has been in remission since he began taking Remicade over 11 years ago to switch to a …
How did we let insurers run health care?
How do you learn to deliver the worst news anyone will ever hear?
And equally important, how do you find the resilience to go on when difficult conversations don’t go well?
My profession for the past 15 years has been to train the next generation of physicians as an inpatient clinician-educator. A key piece of my work revolves around communication with patients and their families. On each new resident team, I coach, …
Letting your resident break the bad news
“The truth is, we were all drowning, alone, and hiding behind the image of perfection. Clearly, each of us secretly thought that the others had it all figured out. We were so afraid of admitting weakness or asking for help, so we kept it to ourselves and muddled through, burnt …
Doctors are humans, not heroes [PODCAST]
I truly believe we’re at the beginning of something great in terms of fundamentally changing how we approach pancreatic cancer, the third leading cause of cancer death in the United States. With a mortality rate of roughly 80 percent, it’s been referred to as a medical emergency, yet minimal progress has been made in its treatment over the past few decades.
In the world of radiation oncology, …
How MRI-guided radiation therapy is changing the paradigm in pancreatic cancer
On Monday, November 1, an Orange County California Superior Court Judge said, in a tentative decision, that the opioid pharmaceutical companies were not responsible for the opioid crisis.
This particular case, going by the name of “The People of the State of California v. Purdue Pharma,” started in 2014. The judge’s ruling noted that neither party requested a trial by jury. The trial took place before the judge between April 19, …
The people vs. opioid pharma: Pharma wins again
“What are altcoins, and should you be investing in them?
I cannot speak to whether investing in altcoins is appropriate for you. Altcoins are a highly volatile and risky asset class that offers the potential for high returns. Every investor must decide whether they are willing to bear the associated …
Alternative cryptocurrencies: 5 tips for physicians [PODCAST]
This article is sponsored by NextGen Healthcare and the #NextGenMind campaign, empowering you to improve your overall health by seeking guidance and mental health support when you or a loved one needs it.
So much emphasis has been placed in recent years on the concept of …
The whole person care model is seeing its day in the sun
It felt like watching a train go by with no control over its destination and no way to stop it. We simply had to watch our loved one as he made his way towards death.
The doctor said he had a traumatic brain injury with herniation. His pupils were fixed and dilated on arrival to the emergency department, which meant that he was not a candidate for any neurosurgical intervention. And …
Every patient is someone’s loved one
“Go ahead, give yourself permission, summon the compassion and grace you’d bestow on your best friend, and tell yourself, “This is the breadth of the human experience, and I’m only human.” There is immense beauty and strength in that vulnerability. I lied to myself for too long, couldn’t see the …
Physicians aren’t all hanging in there. And that’s OK. [PODCAST]
There is an urgent need for innovation in cancer treatments. Although we’ve seen significant progress in indications for drugs treating particular diseases, cancer research data shows that 10-year survival statistics for cancers such as esophageal and lung cancer, for instance, have shown only a 10 percent increase, while pancreatic cancer has shown no significant improvement since the 1970s. The implementation of targeted therapies in cancer treatment is an …
The rise of targeted therapies: the era of the patient-focused approach
“When the medical profession—a career you have pursued for years, a career you love and trust to do no harm does something to shatter the foundations of your sense of trust and worldview, the resulting trauma can be severe resulting in loss of sense of self and life-altering betrayal …
Pamela Wible, MD on physician suicide and medicine’s culture of betrayal [PODCAST]
Chronic pain is an epidemic, currently affecting over 100 million American adults – more than diabetes, heart disease, and cancer combined. This doesn’t include children, 1 in 3 of whom live with a chronic pain condition ranging from migraine to chronic stomachaches. Chronic pain disrupts life, impeding the ability to work, exercise, have sex, engage in hobbies, even go outside. It’s the number one cause of long-term disability in the …
What you don’t know about pain will hurt you
“I was first diagnosed with major depressive disorder as a preteen after my teenage sister died. I attempted suicide three years later. This would be the first of several attempts and the first of countless times I felt my life was not worth living. But I am not unique.
According to the Centers for Disease …
Surviving medical school with depression [PODCAST]
If you find yourself reaching for a bottle or sighing with relief at a well-deserved glass of wine at the end of a stressful day, then you are not alone.
Far more people than you can imagine do the same thing, and many of them feel ashamed that they do.
Those same people are often baffled to learn that alcohol causes the very feeling that they are drinking to alleviate. Most busy …
Stress: Is it time to expose the alcohol con?
An excerpt from Medical Answers Now!: How Direct Primary Care Guarantees Fast Access to Your Doctor.
Health care costs are out of control and volume-based insurance reimbursement models are felt to be contributing to the problem. Medicare and most major private medical insurance carriers have begun testing and transitioning to reimbursement models that pay for health care services based on the …
Direct primary care is an answer to volume-based insurance reimbursement models
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