Moving to the Bay Area from the Midwest was a culture shock in many ways. I was amazed by the diversity, the food, the openness of opinions. And I was struck by the traffic, the stark differences driving from one community to another and the homelessness — you could see signs of it everywhere. As time went on, I acclimated to these changes. Working in the hospital, I got used …
The problem with mental health funding and prisons
Corporate health care mentality set up nurses up to be inhuman while holding us to superhuman expectations. We’re told to be caring — but not allowed to do it. It’s time to demand that we stop being abandoned and dismissed by dysfunctional leadership.
Early in my nursing career, I was assigned to the pediatric area for one shift in a busy emergency department (ED). Our team received notification of an incoming …
A couple of years ago, I read an article by Dr. Profeta at LinkedIn called “These four words that may offend you … may also just save you.” He was invited to talk about burnout in medicine and did not get a warm reception.
“It’s just a job.”
The “it” in this case is medicine. Medicine, just like any other, is just a job. Let that sink in. Everything …
“Alice Woods” is dying of metastatic breast cancer, but she cares little for awareness efforts like pink ribbons and catchy hashtags like #stage4needsmore. You see, Alice has akathisia due to an adverse effect from discontinuing Klonopin — a condition that has caused her far more suffering than her terminal cancer. It has also prevented her from receiving adequate cancer treatment and is, therefore, ending her …
Don’t miss this adverse drug reaction when tapering benzodiazepines
“Where there is no struggle, there is no compassion.”
-Frederick Douglass
Growing up with sickle cell anemia exposed me to the field of medicine. As I go through the pain and complications, it humbles me to the point that motivates me to work harder to be the doctor I want for myself. I want to be a physician-scientist that conducts clinical research targeted toward patients like me. I believe that as a …
How sickle cell anemia influences a medical school journey
In 1976 I graduated from medical school and proudly joined the medical profession. Thirty-seven years later, I retired as an employee of the biggest business in the country. In 2016 the medical industry was responsible for 3.3 trillion dollars of expenditure, comprising 18 percent of the United States GDP. For perspective, there are only four countries with a GDP more than the amount spent on health care in the United …
Medicine: noble profession or big business?
This article is sponsored by Careers by KevinMD.com.
Working in the emergency department or emergency room is not for health care practitioners who want to just chill. Although television’s portrayal of the ER on dramas like “ER” or “Chicago Med” is admittedly high on drama, life and work in the ER really are high pressure.
In 2016, the Read more…
Make peace with stress in the ER
It was the 24th hour of my call shift, and I was running on fumes. Despite my weariness, I could see the first rays of morning sunlight coming through the window in my patient’s room. It was then I knew I could make it to hour 30 (quitting time). It was grueling to keep going, but hitting the 30-hour mark only required me to keep my head down and do …
The evolution of residents’ hours
Burnout and dealing with its symptoms has become a hot topic in the last decade. It’s a problem that has multiple contributing factors. Some of those factors are thrust upon us and are beyond our control, such as government regulations. Other factors are self-imposed, and thus under our control, such as volunteering for extra call shifts. One self-imposed factor is a little thing we use to improve our lives, our …
Is your smartphone leading to burnout?
It is official. I have left my day job and have two months off before starting my next day job thanks to being financially secure. As many of you know, the Tubb’s Fire has led to many changes in my life over the past year. We had many decisions to make and now, 13 months out, are putting those plans into effect. The biggest of these decisions was to …
Being financially secure is different than being financially independent
The health care experience is so much more than a buzzword to be talked about in administrative circles. Some physicians I encounter (a minority, but still enough) really scoff when they hear this term. Responses I’ve heard from doctors include: “Hospitals are not hotels!” or “If that means giving our patients as much Dilaudid as they want, then count me out!”
Aside from these sweeping statements being entirely silly, they are …
3 reasons why we should care about the health care experience
In the United States, any person who has tried getting their own (or their patient’s) radiology images from another hospital or practice will find the practice painful.
Here are several obvious reasons why the CD-ROM — briefly the darling of large data transfer — is a truly terrible way to share radiology images in 2018:
They require physical transfer. Remember the term “snail mail”? Do people still say that?
They are slow. When you bring a …
Why do we still use CD-ROMs for radiology images?
Medicine has changed immensely over the past 40 years. Not only has the drugs, surgeries, and procedures changed, but the culture and economics of medicine have changed as well.
Radiologist and blogger Xrayvsn enlisted physician finance bloggers young and experienced to write posts on the common topic of generational perspectives of the past, present, and future of medicine:
Is it still worth it to go to medical school?
When I finished my training, I was taught that the vast majority of dementia was Alzheimer’s disease, with occasional cases of multi-infarct dementia as well as odd syndromes such as Kreutzfeld-Jacob disease and genetic, traumatic, toxic and tumor-related syndromes. Parkinson’s disease, we were taught, caused a tremor and freezing up of a person’s movements and only very rarely was associated with any kind of memory loss.
These teachings helped us modern …
Lewy body dementia and a farewell to a physician’s father
We talk about money on my website, and how to make sure that you have enough of it. In fact, that’s pretty much the entire strategy for the growing crowd of people in the world who are gunning to retire at an age that most neurosurgeons start their careers.
Those of us in the medical field who also have similar ambitions to work our finances intelligently are likely to have similar …
The psychological impact of quitting medicine
Imagine this scenario. Your two-year-old son has had a runny nose for a day or two and an occasional cough, but seemed no worse to you that everyone else in his preschool class. Two hours after you put him to bed you hear him coughing, only this cough is like none you have ever heard from him before. It sounds like a barking seal at the circus — a brassy, …
Everything you ever wanted to know about croup
Many patients who end up in Suboxone treatment have chronic pain. They were originally prescribed other opiates and ended up addicted to them.
Skeptics argue that is just substituting one opiate for another. But that isn’t quite accurate. More on that in a bit.
In my seven years of prescribing Suboxone for opiate addiction, I have often observed how potent a pain reliever this medication is, even in fairly low doses. More …
Suboxone for pain makes sense. Why don’t more doctors prescribe it?
We know the statistics. More than 50 percent of physicians are experiencing burnout at the hands of EMRs, a nonexistent work-life balance and regulatory constraints to name a few. This is causing physicians to leave clinical medicine and find other work. Some are opting for nonclinical administrative roles, and others are leaving altogether for careers outside of medicine. This is adding to the shortage of physicians that we were already …
Make sure your decision to leave medicine is not based on an emotional response
There is a wealth of information about your health circulating in your blood. For people with diabetes, accessing that information can be a matter of life or death.
For nearly 30 years, the prevailing technology for checking the blood sugars of someone with diabetes has been the fingerstick. People with diabetes are often asked to stick their fingers and check their blood multiple times a day to assess whether their blood …
How technology removes the pain point from diabetes management
This article is sponsored by Careers by KevinMD.com.
When George W. “Billy” Campbell, MD, walks down the street, he never knows who — or what — he’s going to encounter. Anything can happen when you’re the doctor at Foothills Family Medicine of Westminster, South Carolina, a small town with a population of only 2,500.
“I’ve had someone pull …
The stories of rural physicians
Get free updates delivered free to your inbox.
