I ring the doorbell, waiting patiently outside. I hear a weak “coming” and some shuffling. Who greets me is a mother in her robe, hunched over at the waist, supporting her protruding postpartum belly. Her hair is disheveled. Her mask is revealing exhausted eyes with attempted mascara to look a “little freshened up,” she confesses a little later.
“My husband is just getting the baby; please come in.”
I …
Now is the time for postpartum home visits
“Fraud in the health care industry is a fact of life. In 2016 alone, the federal government estimated that improper payments by Medicare and Medicaid totaled about $95 billion. And that’s only a single year’s amount for just two of the government’s many health care programs. With an aging population, increased health care spending, the passage of the CARES Act, and …
Blowing the whistle on health care fraud [PODCAST]
The COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent drop in patient visits have led some observers to conclude that primary care physicians would be better off financially if they were capitated than if they were paid fee for service. If they received a fixed amount of money per health plan member per month, they’d have a guaranteed income stream regardless of how many patients came to their offices.
However, a growing number …
Direct primary care: Great for some doctors, but challenging for patients
For the first 12 years as a physician assistant, I thought provider burnout only happened to wusses, those better suited to working in health insurance or doctoring at a summer camp. Sure, I felt overwhelmed at times, but I planned to soldier on in clinical practice, happily serving my patients until retirement.
That was before. Before dreading Sunday nights, feeling heaviness in my gut, a tightness in my neck, and bouts …
2 tales of physician assistant burnout
You’re finally at the point in your career that you’ve been waiting for! Training has been strenuous, and you have spent many years of your life readying yourself professionally for this moment. It is now time for you to transition from a resident to an attending physician.
At this time, you may be tempted to jump right in and start working. I recommend taking a little time off for yourself first. …
The transition from resident to attending: Setting the stage for your new life and career
“In honor of one of the great classic novels, Go the F**k to Sleep, I would like to present to you my literary work: Stay the F@$k at Home.
To the healthy 20 year old who asks, “Why should I stay the F@$k at home, COVID-19 is not going to kill me?”
I ask: Do you want to kill your nana and grand-pops?
No?
Then …
An infectious disease physician says: Wear a F-ing mask [PODCAST]
Recently on Twitter, I asked this question above.
The 130 (2.5 percent) of 5,213 respondents who said they would allow a CEO to make a skin incision highlight the unscientific nature of Twitter polls. Restricting voting to surgeons only is not possible. Many people asked me why I asked the question because surely no surgeon would ever have allowed it. Here is …
The hospital CEO who made a surgical incision. What happened?
“Although technology and disruptive innovation theoretically diminish systemic barriers and geographic isolation, in practice, they frequently widen chasms in access for vulnerable populations. The reality is telemedicine disproportionately caters to younger, wealthier, and more educated patients.
Hospital systems need to ensure every patient has access to remote health care services, whether through offering landline phone visits, examining pitfalls in digital skill requirements, …
Virtual care needs to be designed for equitable usage and accessibility [PODCAST]
A few short years ago, I started to worry about my family’s financial future while vacationing. During our annual ski trip, I took a nasty fall, landing on my wrist. The pain in my arm made me take notice of just how fragile our financial situation was.
As a self-employed periodontist, I asked myself:
If …
Hassle-free real estate investing for busy doctors
It was only my first week in the hospital as a third-year medical student when we met. I entered your room early Tuesday morning. Only knowing your chief concern, I knocked on your door and entered the room. You didn’t complain when I awakened you. You didn’t complain when I asked many questions about a story you had already relayed multiple times to others. You didn’t complain when …
“Is it possible to have it all? Can you have a job that you love, helping people and using your brain and hands all at the same time; plus, a family, with a spouse and children, that you are always there for? Is it possible to have a balance between your work and your family live while working as a medical …
Making a career change for better work-life balance [PODCAST]
The long debate about rationality and conformity in both medicine and religion has been intense on many levels. Some people claim science requires certainty, validity, and reliability; others believe faith and optimism are essential for scientific advancement. Some reasons for this argument might include the enormous prosecution of scientists Read more…
Where is the line between faith and medicine?
“With COVID-19 raging through the nation, and limited supply of PPE at hospitals, doctors and other critical care personnel are at high risk due to their increased and daily exposure to the virus. For health care workers, the need to plan for a possible worst-case outcome for themselves and their families has become an immediate concern. Doctors are spending limited weekend …
Estate planning and personal finance tips for physicians [PODCAST]
I have been nourished by cafeteria food since elementary school. I remember the public school pizza squares with its melted artificial cheese, the fruit cocktail drenched in sickeningly sweet syrup, and 2 percent chocolate milk pints—costing $1.65 per meal. In college, I enjoyed access to a wider selection, including $6.50 custom omelets and midnight mozzarella sticks to fuel late-night study sessions. However, nothing came close to the quality and …
An excerpt from This Is Your Brain on Food: An Indispensable Guide to the Surprising Foods that Fight Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, OCD, ADHD, and More.
Suzy was a bright and hardworking student. However, even though she was conscientious and generally cheery, her grades began to fall during …
Can what you eat worsen your ADHD?
I love being an emergency doctor. I loved my residency, my co-residents, and my attendings.
I love my training: watching, learning, treating.
I love the emergency department, the vastness, and the variability of emergency medicine.
But I am tired.
I am tired of feeling like a workhorse, a production line made to just churn patients in and out.
I am tired of being told that my worth as a doctor is based on my time …
I am tired. But I still love emergency medicine.
“We are blessed to work in a clinic that has a very large immigrant population. Over the years, we have cared for those who speak over 80+ languages with an even higher number of unique countries and regions represented. Arabic and Spanish are our two most commonly spoken non-English languages. We also have patients who speak unique languages such as Kurdish, …
How to help families struggling to find their way in a foreign culture [PODCAST]
President Trump recently signed two executive orders directly related to prescription drug prices in the U.S.
One order would allow the “reimportation” of prescription drugs from Canada. This longstanding idea would allow U.S. pharmacies and drug wholesalers the ability to pay generally much lower prices for their prescription drugs by getting them from Canadian suppliers who benefit from government management of the system. Many consumers have been buying direct from Canadian …
Why is the government so scared of directly negotiating drug prices?
Human kindness is a trait that, though inherent within our genetic make-up, can also be a learned behavior.
The absence of human kindness is blatantly visible to others when a lack of compassion and/or empathy permeates within an interaction with another human being.
As our daily life responsibilities continue at a steady state: mundane things such as paying bills, holding down a job and successfully interacting with co-workers, our ability to respond …
The impact of COVID-19 on human kindness
“Building great tech for doctors is no different from ventilator technology. In some scenarios, you will want to talk to the EMR like you talk to Siri, rather than poring over a screen littered with boxes and lists. In other cases, you will want elegant graphs intuitively laid out to show how your ICU patient is progressing. Other solutions will go …
AI-powered, digital voice assistants in the exam room [PODCAST]
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