On my first day of medical school, my father, a dentist, told me he’d just been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Cancer had crept back into my life — except this time not into my body.
At age 12, I was diagnosed with brain cancer. After an aggressive surgery, I was tumor-free for 10 years. Then, at 23, I received the news of an inoperable recurrence.
While going through radiation and …
Have you ever felt so cold? I mean bone-chilling cold. I don’t mean the same kind of cold that northern winters can leave you feeling. I am talking about working in a hospital that is climate-controlled, and you are undoubtedly shivering.
I still remember my first day on the job as a neonatology fellow. I was anxiously walking to the operating room to attend the delivery of a 25-week infant. As …
Sometimes things go just the way you want them to, and sometimes they don’t.
Compare and contrast the case of two different patients, and how things went trying to get them the care they needed.
The first patient, let’s call him Mr. Smith, called up one day last week with a brand-new symptom, which after a phone call was ultimately determined to be disturbing enough that he was offered a same-day appointment.
After …
Within the medical community, there seems to be a prevailing belief that when it comes to business and finance: Well, we’re just not very good at it. Some chalk it up to the lack of financial training we received in medical school. Others say it’s simply not in the physician’s DNA – that our brains are wired differently.
I would disagree.
In reality, I’ve seen many, many physicians become successful …
I don’t miss making the phone calls in the middle of the night.
“Hi, this is Dr. Yang calling from the psychiatric emergency service. May I speak to Mr. or Mrs. Doe?”
“Yeah, this is Mr. Doe,” he’d reply, his voice thick and slow with sleep.
“I’m sorry to call so late. Your son is here at the hospital.” Take a breath and slow down for the next part. “He’s alive and doing OK at …
There’s a lot of financial information out there. Some of it is helpful, and some of it is unhelpful.
I’m sure many of you take notice when the Dow Jones falls 1,000 points in two days.
And even if you don’t usually follow the stock market on a daily basis, when the stock market is dropping, the financial news media will let you know about it.
Because when the stock market is crashing, …
The discharge process has now been recognized as one of the most crucial points at which the actions of doctors and hospitals can have a huge impact on immediate health outcomes for our patients. At a time when 30-day readmission rates are still touching almost 20 percent for Medicare patients (higher for certain patients, with up to a third of these occurring in the first 7 days), there is an …
Failure is a guarantee. “Success” assumes that certain metrics have been set and that the words used to describe those metrics are understood in the exact same way by all parties involved. One patient with parotid cancer and given facial paralysis after surgery was thrilled to be alive. Another is furious about a widened scar.
The brain, primed to act on behalf of the organism, works at times without our input …
This article is sponsored by Careers by KevinMD.com.
Whether you’re looking for a new position or just wanting to connect with colleagues, LinkedIn is a great resource to advance your career. As a healthcare professional, having an online presence can understandably make you uneasy, especially when it comes to concerns about privacy or potential HIPAA violations. However, in today’s technological …
In the era of #MeToo, Missy Elliot, Whitney Houston, Tyler Perry, Oprah, Ashley Judd, Gabrielle Union, Teri Hatcher and, now, Padma Lakshmi — keeping kids safe and helping adults heal is our job as physicians. I am a pediatrician — and I am an incest survivor. My perpetrator was also a physician. I bore a dirty secret before I knew what a secret was. The person who hurt me was …
The medicine I practiced between 1974 to 1992 is gone. Evidence is the coin of the realm in the courts of modern medicine. The rule “first, do no harm” demands a corollary — be paranoid.
We receive extensive training and licensure to “touch” patients. Any person who is not a physician who cuts into another person commits a very serious crime. The same is true for merely talking with a person, …
I am both relieved and nervous because they say that the first year is the worst, but now I have the overarching cloud of doom following me around during second year: Step 1.
Now that I’m home, I constantly am wondering how I made it this far — in disbelief that I passed all my courses pretty well. I constantly ask myself if exams were too easy and if I’m just …
Physician financial literacy is dismal. In the past, many physicians got their first introduction to finance from insurance salesman or financial advisors who give presentations over a free steak dinner.
My medical school’s attempt at teaching us personal finance was to have a financial advisory firm give a half-day lecture about student loan management, budgeting, and investing. While the advice wasn’t inherently bad, I don’t think many of my classmates retained …
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By the time you read this, I will have completed a transition to working half-time. Now, I know a lot of docs out there think emergency docs are already only working half-time, so perhaps I ought to start with explaining why that isn’t the case, even if emergency physicians work fewer hours than many other physicians.
Let’s start with the fact that most Americans consider 35 to 40 hours a week …
A vivid memory stands out from my career.
Driving home from the hospital at 3 a.m., I reflected upon my most recent patient’s middle of the night delivery. It wasn’t an easy delivery, as they often aren’t. However, in the end, we had a healthy mom and baby and the family couldn’t have been happier — nor could I.
I felt a sense of gratitude as I was driving in the darkness …
I had the fascinating experience of interviewing for residency at 20+ weeks’ pregnant. Although a number of people told me that I was doomed, I found the experience to be quite enlightening. Since I couldn’t hide the fact that life outside medicine was going to be important to me during residency, I felt empowered to ask the “don’t ask” questions during my interviews. What did I have to lose? The …
Who was Ryan Haight?
Ryan Haight was an 18-year-old honor student from La Mesa, California who died on February 12, 2001, from an overdose of hydrocodone ordered from an online doctor he never saw — and shipped to his home from a rogue online pharmacy during the beginning of the opioid epidemic.
The pharmacist, Clayton Fuchs, filled the online prescription …
An excerpt from Let Go of Emotional Overeating and Love Your Food: A Five-Point Plan for Success. Copyright © 2018 by Arlene B. Englander. Published by Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved.
Anyone who has ever tried to lose weight or keep weight off realizes that evening can be …
Over the last 20 years, physical fitness as a means to improve overall health has increased among the over-40 set. This is great, right? Yes, absolutely. Athletes who remain active as they age do a better job than non-athletes in retaining lean muscle mass. They also show improved bone density, bone structure and bone strength. However, what physicians are seeing are injuries related to the increased level of activity.
One area …
The glorious season is upon us. Yes, it is finally autumn. But it is also the season of ERAS with all of its letters of recommendation, USMLE scores, medical school transcripts, and personal statements.
I have dutifully reviewed dozens of applicants whose last names begin with the letters “T” through “Z.” I have noted the test scores and grades. I have considered the caliber of medical school and whether the LORs …
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