This past week, an unhinged man in Atlanta committed an atrocity. He went to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) with five guns and killed a policeman. He blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal, and it is reported that he had been reaching out for mental health assistance for weeks.
Since January 2022, I have been interacting with national experts on a clinical problem that has hit …
As physicians, we are highly motivated, educated, hardworking and compassionate individuals. We deserve the best that life can offer. I do not mean the nicest houses or fanciest cars (although there is nothing wrong with luxuries). What I am referring to is having the type of career that brings out the best in us. A work environment that allows us to share our gifts easily and effortlessly ultimately contributing to …
In medicine, self-sacrifice is praised. We call it dedication. We call it loyalty. However, sometimes it is just exhaustion wearing a badge of honor, and it keeps us complicit in systems that harm us and our patients.
Burnout does not kick the door in. It just shows up quietly. One day you notice you have not called a friend back in weeks. Lunch, if you can call it that, is an …
Each year, I leave behind the electronic health record, performance metrics, malpractice fears, and the ever-present hum of burnout—and lead a medical mission trip—this year to Nicaragua. Along with a team of fellow volunteers, I carry only what we can pack: a few stethoscopes, essential supplies, and the will to serve.
We set up clinics in makeshift church halls with tin roofs in …
As technology becomes increasingly embedded in clinical workflows, many health care clinicians are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help lighten the charting load. One of the most buzzed-about tools is ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot that seems like it can do everything from planning your next vacation to California, analyzing the best applications for a job, to writing your History of Present Illness (HPI) for a diabetic patient.
Before …
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second-deadliest cancer in the U.S.; however, screening rates remain too low due to a combination of lack of awareness, patient fear, and health care system barriers. Many patients don’t realize they are at risk because early-stage CRC has no symptoms, making screening the only way to detect and prevent disease progression.
As frontline health care providers, nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician associates/assistants (PAs) are uniquely positioned …
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Physician coach and medical school professor Kathleen Muldoon discusses her article, “How motherhood reshaped my identity as a scientist and teacher.” She explores what it means to be a “mother scholar” in …
Well, that didn’t take long, did it?
Today’s “controversy du jour” is prevention in health care. More specifically, vaccines and their role in preventing disease, disability, and death while promoting health and lifespan.
Prevention is the mother’s milk of health care. It is core to reducing illness and disease. Sadly, the udders producing that milk are drying up quicker than you can shake a fist at what is happening before our very …
The culture of medicine is shaped in quiet ways, by the way meetings begin, the pregnant pauses before a response, and the energy transmitted in emails sent and received. These seemingly insignificant experiences ripple outward, setting the tone for entire teams, shaping what is spoken and what is not, shaping what feels possible and what feels unsafe.
The culture of medicine is not an abstract force. It is built moment by …
In the bustling environment of modern health care, the loudest voices frequently attract the most attention. Yet, a special category of physicians who are less visible but no less significant exists: the efficient, quiet clinicians who are usually underestimated. This physician type blends high productivity with a calm demeanor, allowing skill and results to speak louder than words.
Underestimation can undermine leadership opportunities for quiet physicians because visibility may play a …
In the late 1970s, a Japanese biochemist named Akira Endo discovered a compound from fungus that inhibited HMG-CoA reductase, the enzyme responsible for making cholesterol. It was an academic curiosity at the time. No one knew if lowering cholesterol would prevent heart attacks—it just lowered a number on a lab slip.
That compound eventually became lovastatin, and in 1987, Merck brought it to market with no proof of improved outcomes—only a …
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Physician executive Bhargav Raman discusses his article, “Why fearing AI is really about fearing ourselves.” He argues that the common doomsday predictions about artificial intelligence are a projection of our own human …
It is time we talk about a critical, yet often overlooked, factor contributing to physician burnout: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), particularly in those with high IQs and a history of academic and professional success.
Many physicians, often driven and intellectually gifted, develop sophisticated coping mechanisms that mask their ADHD symptoms for years, even decades. Their high IQ can, paradoxically, compensate for executive function deficits, allowing them to excel in demanding environments like …
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Sometimes, the stethoscope doesn’t catch what the heart is really saying.
It was just another morning during my surgery posting. I was reviewing pre-op workups when I was asked to assist with the echo evaluation of an elderly woman scheduled for a routine procedure. Her echo report flashed across the screen: smooth curves, rhythmic contractions, and valves opening and closing like well-oiled gates. The left ventricular ejection fraction was over 60 …
It is happening more often than most people realize. The same physicians who seem unshakable in the OR or clinic, the ones who handle chaos without blinking, are quietly scheduling therapy appointments. Not because they have “hit rock bottom” or cannot do their jobs anymore, but because they are realizing they do not have to slowly carry it all alone. Nor can they sustain this level of burnout anymore.
As a …
Over the past several years, each time a periodic U.S. hospital closures report is released, the number failing financial stress tests and at extreme risk of closing rises. The number now approaches 800 nationwide.
Meanwhile, many project that the just-passed One Big Beautiful Bill will rapidly increase these closures and further degrade health care access for American citizens.
Touted reasons for accelerating hospital closures, especially impacting …
How many times have we heard “Whatever you say doc, I know you will do right by me. You always have and I know you will.” Or, “What do you think, doctor? Do you think I should do this?” Or, …
Emergency medicine residency: where the pager announces before your coffee cools, and your personal life takes a number far behind sepsis alerts and trauma activations. Amidst this storm, there’s an unexpected survival manual—not found in Tintinalli’s or Rosen’s, but in Mark Manson’s self-help book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
Manson argues that life’s meaning isn’t found in chasing positivity, but in embracing struggle, choosing your battles wisely, …
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Renowned fertility specialist Oluyemisi (Yemi) Famuyiwa discusses her article, “When bleeding disorders meet IVF: Navigating von Willebrand disease in fertility treatment.” She explains that von Willebrand disease (VWD), the most common inherited …
It’s all fun and games until your health becomes one big puzzle to solve, and little do many people know what risks and hazards might surround us during our favorite summertime activities. I learned this personally after what should have been an innocent business trip turned into a year-and-a-half nightmare for me after contaminated water made me sick. I contracted bacteria that led to a secondary chronic inflammatory breast disease. What …
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