I heard about you a few times before I ever met you in person. It was my first day on the palliative care service — a week that felt like a relaxing break from the sixteen-hour days I was used to on surgery. Many people don’t know what palliative care is. But I suspect these days if you are still living that you know it well.
I first heard of you …
A letter to a cancer patient in palliative care
The gender imbalance in nursing, our nation’s largest profession, is a slow-to-change and complex problem steeped in stereotypes, economics, unconscious bias, power, and privilege in health care and society. Along with other diversity gaps in the nursing workforce, gender imbalance is another missing piece to achieving the highest quality patient care. Solving the gender imbalance could accelerate the profession in reaching its full potential.
Diversity improves quality
Addressing the gender gap represents …
The gender imbalance in nursing
What really makes a person complete?
What do we want in our lives, and what is it like to become our best, most fulfilled selves?
In the 1960s, psychologist Abraham Maslow tried to answer this question. This eventually led to his well-known hierarchy of needs. You might be familiar with the pyramid.
The premise of the theory is that once we fulfill our basic needs …
How physicians can become self-actualized
I have noticed a profound lack of self-esteem in our profession. I am concerned. Concerned for us, and for our patients.
We are the most noble of professions. However, we have compromised our morals, values, ethics, and virtues. We are now living, operating, and existing in a constant state of contradiction. It is tearing us apart from within.
We continue to work for less, with fewer resources and ancillary staff, all while …
There is a profound lack of self-esteem in the medical profession
“What challenges do you see yourself facing as a doctor?”
I’m sitting in a suit, facing a young Asian woman with black, round glasses across a desk. On the desk in front of her is an iPad, and she sits cross-legged, hands resting on her legs. I’m in my interview for medical school, and the woman across me, who introduced herself as Angela, is awaiting my response.
I pause and mentally check …
What challenges do you see yourself facing as a doctor?
This time last year, I took the podium at conferences as far away as Dubai to deliver my keynote speech entitled, “On The Cusp Of Life And Death, Choose Life.” My talk highlighted the professional and personal development opportunities that show up as doctors, nurses, and parents navigate the challenges in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) caring for preterm and term newborns on the cusp of viability due to …
3 lessons physicians can learn from adversity
Harvard Medical School student Chloe Li typically dressed in scrubs or an efficient, professional outfit as she went about learning to care for patients in the intense, year-long clerkship program where I teach.
For her capstone presentation on graduation day, though, she wore a cream-colored wrap-around dress of luscious silk, tasteful jewelry, and an up-do hairstyle. She had clearly put a lot of care into these preparations. She …
The unintended consequences of #MeToo in medical education
I recently spoke with a colleague who transitioned out of the military in the last year. He was previously excited about his new job opportunity, but now a year later, he tells me, “I hate civilian medicine.”
I was surprised because he had been excited about the opportunity to teach in a residency program again. He said, “I love teaching, and I love the residents. …
9 hacks that will increase your clinical efficiency immediately
Before direct-to-consumer ads, physicians tried to reassure patients they were probably fine. Today, drug ads and online symptom checkers do just the opposite. The most insidious are “unbranded” ads that scare people about a disease without mentioning the drug they are trying to sell. Notable unbranded disease campaigns sell the obscure exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, shift work sleep disorder, and non-24-hour, sleep-wake disorder. Unbranded advertising is designed to appear like a …
Drugmakers discover tardive dyskinesia. And they profit in it.
Stock photos of “health care workers” who attend patients — physicians are no longer distinguishable — usually feature a stethoscope draped around the neck.
But some, such as cardiologist Eric Topol, consider the stethoscope obsolete, nothing more than a pair of “rubber tubes.”
The most important part of the stethoscope is the part between the ears. But some think that will be replaced by artificial intelligence and the rubber tubes by sophisticated …
The stethoscope is not just a prop
You were strong in college
You were strong enough to get through weed-out classes in undergrad. You were strong enough to balance the extra-curricular activities and clinical shadowing expected of you while crushing a 21-hour semester. You were strong enough to say, “no, I have to study” when friends wanted to go out because you had a dream of becoming a doctor someday.
You were strong enough to pay for the applications, …
Doctor: You were strong. You are still strong today.
I paced in the hallway outside of the patient’s room, going over my mental checklist of items to do during the history and physical examination. Bringing in a paper list was discouraged; we were meant to “flow” through the exam “naturally.”
I stuffed my hands into the pockets of the white coat I’d received three weeks earlier, during the White Coat Ceremony for first-year medical students. Feeling around the deep pockets …
The first lesson in medical school: Say you’re sorry
I recently returned from my second extended stay in New Zealand with my family. The entire experience was wonderful, but perhaps our most memorable day began with our three teenage sons waking up early to surf in the South Pacific Ocean. Once we had our fill of tropical paradise, we jumped in the car and drove a few hours to the local ski resort, where we found 10 feet of …
The secret to travel doctor success? Bring your family.
Why do so many of us (meaning me) need to be reminded to act with kindness? Why can’t we “just do it”?
Yesterday, a friend asked me why we don’t celebrate World Kindness Day every day. I believe that’s a wonderful idea. But in practice, it’s not so easy. So, I got to thinking about why that is.
If we want to spread the ripple effects of kindness — to our families, …
7 reasons why it’s hard to be kind
OK, quick — word association time.
I say “doctor,” and you think what? “Smart,” right?
And it’s true. Doctors are smart. But before you buy into the myth that every doctor has breezed through school and could fall out of bed with a #2 pencil and crush an exam without thinking about it, consider that over 1,100 internal medicine doctors fail their board exam every year.
And that’s just one medical specialty. When …
3 reasons why smart doctors fail big exams
When I graduated from residency, I was too worried about killing my first few patients to examine the meaning of being an attending physician. An early patient, a 97-year-old retired doc, brought it to my attention.
“Being an attending physician means you attend. When you attend me, all I want you to do is show up. You do not have to do anything. Keep the people with needles, knives, and nonsense away from …
The key to being an attending physician
Embarrassment is a feeling of awkward self-consciousness or shame. It manifests as a sense of discomfort or even foolishness around others. Feeling embarrassed is emotionally painful because it means you feel uncomfortable with yourself.
The problem with embarrassment is that it adds a layer of mental suffering to the difficulties you’re already facing with your health. Here are four reasons why those of us who are chronically ill feel embarrassed at …
What to do when chronic illness is a source of embarrassment
“Words Kill” is a brilliant song about the perils of texting and driving. Spread the message.
Courtesy of The Fever Breakers, a band made up of hospital employees. Their socially conscious songs are crafted in the basement of the hospital using a piano used for cancer patient music therapy and subsequently recorded in a studio.
A brilliant song about the perils of texting and driving
As a young medical student, in my early 20s, I was still too inexperienced to know how a physician was “supposed to” act.
But I took the model of stoicism that I learned from my East Indian father and applied it to the medical model. Lectures on “professional detachment” reinforced this. I remember being told that it was the doctor’s job to keep a professional distance from a patient. By getting …
It’s OK to cry when a patient dies
Think studying abroad doesn’t fit with your future plans? Think again.
Since the day I applied to university, I had been researching how I could incorporate global learning into my undergraduate degree program, while also thinking about my future goals for getting into medical school. When I was accepted to do a Bachelor of Science with a double major in chemistry and biology, I surprisingly still found time for extracurricular activities …
How studying abroad helped get me into medicine
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