Studies show over and over again that empathy is the key to physician-patient communication and is directly related to patient satisfaction, adherence to medical treatment, lawsuits, and clinical outcomes. Yet despite its importance, many doctors still struggle with showing empathy.
The reality is that while most medical students start school with high levels of empathy, it doesn’t take long before that empathy is beaten out of us. Studies show …
I’m supposed to speak at the body donor memorial in September. I told the organizers my speech was written. “Don’t worry,” I assured them. “I have it all in my head, just need to get it down on paper. I’m a writer; it’s my process.” But the truth is that I am struggling with what to say. I’ve tried to write it, but I just end up drinking a pot …
At the heart of American medicine is the concept of bedside manner, and with it the concern that doctors are cold and unemotional. Indeed, doctors are exposed to disease and misfortune on a daily basis. A patient who presents with stage IV metastatic stomach cancer is just one of the many hundreds or thousands of such patients that will walk through the hospital doors in the coming years. Quotidian exposure …
I’ve been thinking about this over the last ten and a half years since my soul mate had a cardiac arrest and died. He was 38 and as fit as a fiddle. I am a rural general practitioner in South Australia (family practitioner in American parlance). He left behind four kids (from his previous relationship), and me with a broken heart. We had been together a little over two years.
Western …
Earlier this month I read a Wall Street Journal article about Zeynep Ton’s Good Jobs Index. Who is Zeynep Ton? She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management who has ranked retailers on employee happiness. This was so positive. It was good to hear about businesses concerned about employee happiness and not just about profits and shareholders.
Two weeks later I was dismayed to …
While studying for a certification exam, I came across a question that stayed with me well after taking the practice test. The case discussed a patient who was prescribed antibiotics by his physician for a presumed bacterial illness and then returned the following week with an antibiotic-associated diarrheal infection. The test question then asked what could be concluded from this case. The answer: informed consent (i.e., patient permission for a …
Ask physicians across the country what problems they want solved, and they won’t hesitate to tell you. They worry about the growing health risks they observe in patients based on lifestyle choices, obesity and a variety of social factors that they feel powerless to change. Ask what they would modify if they had a magic wand, and they’ll point to the illogical, problematic and increasingly complex reimbursement schemes still favored …
My family was driving to see our new niece this past Saturday. While passing through a town on the way, we came upon a motorcycle accident. The rider had been hit by a vehicle and was lying on the pavement with a growing crowd of people who wanted to help. I’ve done it before. I did CPR at the scene of a wreck when I was in medical school, and …
Sixty years ago, before he became a controversial figure in the field of psychiatry, Dr. Thomas S. Szasz co-authored an article for the Archives of Internal Medicine (now JAMA Internal Medicine) on “The Basic Models of the Doctor-Patient Relationship,” which is well worth reading today, particularly for those who believe that patient empowerment/engagement is a novel and disruptive innovation of our digital times.
The paper is describing …
Did it ever occur to some of today’s physicians that many people work awfully hard and complain a lot less than they do about “burnout” and “work-life balance”?
Did it ever occur to them that “work-life balance” is the very definition of a first-world problem, unique to a very privileged class of highly educated people, most of whom are white?
Every day, I go to work and see the example of the …
It was only a matter of time before Kim Kardashian posted a picture on her Instagram account with a bottle of Diclegis, basically announcing her brand partnership with Duchesnay, the manufacturer of the prescription medication for nausea and vomiting in pregnancy. Duchesnay had been tweeting for ages that they were so relieved Kim had found help with Diclegis — so much so that I was wondering if Ms. …
“I’m just the night doc,” you said. You said it with emphasis as if that explained everything and dismissed your incompetence, your lack of compassion, your failure to care. Unfortunately my sister was “just the patient,” who lay suffering hours before her death and the RN was “just the nurse” withholding the morphine that the daytime doctor had ordered for air hunger and agitation. The nurse called you in to …
A few weeks ago, after feeding my face with rich, dense chocolate cake brought by a truly awesome nurse (for no particular reason other than a warm and generous spirit), I walked back into a room to check on a post-cardiac arrest patient.
After surveying his vitals on the monitor, I turned my attention to two nurses and a pharmacist who were discussing the management of his six drips. He was …
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As a relatively young physician, I always enjoy my conversations with the older members of our profession, who’ve seen so much change over the last few decades. I’m fascinated with their stories about how different the medical world was when they were residents, how treatments were so novel, and how they used solid clinical skills to get to the diagnosis.
Those were the …
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 67-year-old woman is evaluated for a 1-year history of loose stools. She reports approximately four episodes per day without abdominal pain. She has not had nausea, vomiting, weight loss, bright red blood per rectum, or melena.
On physical examination, temperature is 36.7 °C (98.1 °F), blood pressure is 115/85 mm Hg, pulse …
A guest column by the American College of Physicians, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
I love pre-visit planning.
OK, “love” may be too strong a word — I like pre-visit planning. Pre-visit planning isn’t new. Many of you have done it for years, even before it had a name, for example when pre-ordering labs before a visit.
I did not begin …
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There was once a little boy who loved to draw. He would wake up every morning, pull out his box of colored pencils, and let his hands explore the promise of a pristine sheet of blank paper. For him, the canvas was anything but empty, images and ideas exploded out of his mind and magically appeared on the pages in front of …
Have you ever had a professional photo shoot? I have had many, but not because I particularly enjoy being photographed. Actually, it is quite the contrary.
Photo shoots have always been a traumatic experience for me. You see, for some reason, likely as a creative form of cruel parenting punishment, my family of five siblings had a photo taken every year while growing up. …
Being a doctor is one of the most emotionally and physically demanding professions out there. The health care landscape may have changed a lot over the last decade, but the basic unavoidable grueling nature of medical practice has been the same for time immemorial. I remember reading a careers advice book when I was a teenager telling me just that being a doctor was “the most challenging of jobs,” and …
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Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) is the process of administering a preparation of healthy donor stool to a patient with a certain disease, usually Clostridium difficile colitis, in an attempt to treat the disease. I covered some of the basics about the microbiome and FMT in a previous article, so this will just be a cookbook-style post on how we do FMT with colonoscopy.
First, a healthy donor must be identified. The donor …
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