“Before COVID-19, I left the practice of medicine for what would turn out to become an entire year. While away, I found a new way of seeing our hearts and bodies as humans in the medical profession, allowing me to return.
Here are five lessons I learned in the hope they might help …
What I learned from stepping away from medicine for a year [PODCAST]
“Don’t be the patient that says: ‘Doc, just tell me what to do …’ Instead, you should ask for information to empower yourself to make decisions about your healing process. Framing questions around the clinician’s experience is always a good starting point; pretend to be the doctor for just a moment and …
Don’t be the patient that says these words [PODCAST]
In the “Show-Me State” of Missouri, physicians receive their licenses from the Board of Registration for the Healing Arts. Seriously! This quaint term harkens back to a time when newly minted doctors had a relatively easy time realizing their desire to meld compassion, knowledge, and skill in order to relieve human suffering.
Armed with credentials suggesting that we have the right stuff to avoid doing harm, many of us are drawn …
Medtech companies realize that it’s not a trivial task to get a surgeon to just start using a new device. Surgeons have a great deal of responsibility, and their job involves learning a lot of techniques. Therefore, when surgeons learn a technique and master it over the course of years and decades, it will take a lot of convincing to get them to switch to a new one.
But technological progress …
Here’s how doctors can support medtech innovation
“Continuing to do this work the way I was doing it was not sustainable. I needed to get off the merry-go-round. I just didn’t know how. I didn’t think I could stop myself—transplant was my duty, my responsibility, and what I was trained and programmed to do. It was hard to imagine …
A transplant physician faces facts about his career [PODCAST]
The foundation of modern medicine has been built on a well-established, iterative process of empirical research and the pragmatic implementation of new discoveries. A relevant example of this paradigm can be seen in the development of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines.
Researchers developed a hypothesis to use an mRNA vaccine, demonstrated its promise in animal research and substantiated its safety and effectiveness in human subjects through clinical trials, leading to the …
We already know how to save physicians from burnout
This article is sponsored by the Dragon Ambient eXperience at Nuance. The exam of the future has arrived with clinical documentation that writes itself.
Recently, I participated in a virtual webinar, “How …
How AI technologies improve the patient experience
“Machine learning is only as good as the information provided to train the machine. Models trained on partial datasets can skew toward demographics that often turned up in the data—for example, Caucasians or men over 60. There is concern that “analyses based on faulty or biased algorithms could exacerbate existing racial …
Artificial intelligence, COVID-19, and the future of pandemics [PODCAST]
Toward the end of my clinical career, I didn’t feel like I had control over much at all. The patient safety issues loomed large. We used ridiculous workarounds for broken processes. The constant vigilance to provide excellent care in a suboptimal environment was exhausting. I didn’t see anything I could change. Based on my work with physicians as a coach, I think that the sense of powerlessness and being a …
The sense of powerlessness and being a cog in a wheel is now at an all-time high
“The future of health care will be focused on prevention rather than focused on performing excessive medical treatments, diagnostic tests, and procedures. Many centralized processes, services, products, and entities will become unbundled, including insurance, hospitalization, inpatient and outpatient coding, medical billing, payments, patient care, medical education, licensure, and certification. Physicians, including Leah …
Blockchain in health care and in your portfolio [PODCAST]
Programs and applicants displayed incredible adaptations during the 2020-2021 virtual residency interview season despite the adversity they faced due to COVID-19.
Moving forward, virtual features may be integrated with traditional methods for a more equitable and favorable experience. We present here a discussion on the pros and cons of the 2020-2021 “virtual” residency interview season — and ways of hybridizing virtual and in-person practices that reimagine modern interviewing and improve applicant …
The future of residency interviews
“Something’s wrong with Eddie.”
In four words, my entire wedding day collapsed around me. I’d just arrived at a beautiful Gothic chapel in a rented 1950 Rolls Royce, mom and dad on either side of me, prepared for a picture-perfect first look with my groom. As his mother’s words echoed in my ear, I immediately thought of all the scenarios that could be easily remedied so we could move forward with …
How a doctor fell in love with a drug addict
In my first year as an attending hospitalist, I personally discovered what Hippocrates realized millennia before, “Life is short and the art long.” Clinical reasoning is an intellectual labyrinth that can only be mastered with deliberate practice, introspection, and perseverance.
However, I soon found that spending hours poring through manuscripts and cases was not only cumbersome, but often counterproductive. It dawned on me then that athletes faced a similar predicament, one …
How photography made me a better doctor
“In addition to leaking private information to an unauthorized individual who just happened to ask for Ms. Mann by name, Larry commanded Nigel to worsen this HIPAA violation. Given the tone of his command, Larry must have felt right proud of his informing an aggressive, unconfirmed querent. If so, perhaps he should …
Patient satisfaction through a hospitalist lens [PODCAST]
Most of us have heard the phrase “success is about who you know,” and that couldn’t be more true. The people we surround ourselves with are a direct reflection of our life and success. One thing that affects this is emotional intelligence, or EQ for short. It’s not just about how smart you are; it also has to do with your ability to understand and manage your own emotions and …
Why physicians should care about emotional intelligence
“Even though prostate cancer patients are anxious to receive treatment, they still want to minimize their exposure to anyone outside their COVID bubble. One procedure that is especially attractive to our patients is focal therapy high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU).
Focal therapy HIFU is appropriate for patients whose prostate cancer is diagnosed at …
An update on prostate cancer treatment [PODCAST]
An excerpt from Brain Storm: A Life in Pieces.
The first time it happened, I sat only a few feet away from Yael in her tiny office, a position that usually made me feel safe, but this time I was about to explode.
“Shelley, what’s going on?”
I couldn’t squelch my intense agitation. “I feel like I’m going to jump out a window!”
“You’re …
A physician’s story of dissociative identity disorder
Ketamine (colloquially called “K,” “Special K,” or “Vitamin K”) is a potent, dissociative anesthetic. More specifically, it is a nonselective NMDA antagonist that initiates a wide array of physiological effects, already having ingratiated itself to a wider audience through its potential for abuse. Once used primarily in veterinary medicine, ketamine in recent years, however, has seen its medical applications extend beyond the realm of anesthesia, with clinical options now including …
Ketamine’s non-anesthetic powers: Please wait for the science
Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of assisting more than 2,000 distressed physicians – some with burnout, others with “rough edges,” still others with psychiatric conditions or misuse of drugs and alcohol. Some of these doctors were still functioning well; others had lost their licenses and their livelihoods, hoping against hope that they would somehow be able to return to medicine. Linking all these physicians is a shared passion …
Organizations that nurture physicians’ careers can attract and retain the best doctors
“We need to crawl before we walk and walk before we run. The first step is to establish your why. Why do you want the financial freedom to practice medicine because you want to, the way you want to instead of because you have to? Without a why, even achieving financial …
Why do physicians fail to focus on their personal finances? [PODCAST]
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