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A surgeon mistakes a kidney for a tumor. How can this happen?

Conditions

December 3, 2018

A number of media outlets recently featured a story about a Florida general surgeon who removed a normal kidney from a woman who was undergoing spine surgery. How could this have occurred?

The 51-year-old patient who had been injured in a car crash was scheduled for an anterior lumbar interbody fusion (ALIF) of the fifth lumbar to the first sacral vertebra. The general surgeon’s role was to provide …

Here’s what the corporatization of medicine is doing

Naeem Rahman, MD

Policy

December 2, 2018

Have you ever been to a doctor’s office and felt that your evaluation was rushed? Have you been seen in the emergency room and felt that you were just a number in a long series of patients? Have you ever seen the same doctor for years and felt like the doctor just met you for the first time each visit?

Chances are we’ve all experienced this as patients. If we’re honest, …

How to reduce burnout in emergency medicine

Health eCareers

Physician

December 1, 2018

This article is sponsored by Careers by KevinMD.com.

As rewarding as working in emergency medicine can be, it also comes with some significant potential downsides. According to some recent studies, stress and burnout rates in the emergency room are some of the worst in the medical field. But don’t let that dampen your enthusiasm. Managing the proper …

Physicians who pursue financial independence and early retirement are not wrong. It may save them.

James Turner, MD

Finance

November 30, 2018

When Jason Kilar graduated from college he experienced tremendous personal and professional adversity. Three days after graduation, Kilar’s father ended his own life after battling bipolar disorder.

Kilar also battled professional valleys. In the months after graduation, the work-life he had long envisioned couldn’t have seemed further from the reality he faced.

After building shelves at a local store and hustling to find a job that he actually loved, this is what …

The problem with mental health funding and prisons

Deepika Parmar, MD

Policy

November 29, 2018

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 …

Nurses aren’t commodities

Sarah E. Jorgensen, RN

Policy

November 28, 2018

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 …

Read more…

Nurses aren’t commodities

Medicine is just a job

Kpeds, MD

Physician

November 28, 2018

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 …

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Medicine is just a job

Don’t miss this adverse drug reaction when tapering benzodiazepines

Christy Huff, MD

Meds

November 27, 2018

“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 …

How sickle cell anemia influences a medical school journey

Bianca Bowden

Education

November 25, 2018

“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 …

Medicine: noble profession or big business?

David A. Guss, MD

Policy

November 24, 2018

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 …

Make peace with stress in the ER

Health eCareers

Physician

November 24, 2018

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

The evolution of residents’ hours

Kevin Tolliver, MD, MBA

Physician

November 23, 2018

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 …

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The evolution of residents’ hours

Is your smartphone leading to burnout?

Cory Fawcett, MD

Tech

November 22, 2018

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 …

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Is your smartphone leading to burnout?

Being financially secure is different than being financially independent

Dads Dollars Debts, MD

Finance

November 22, 2018

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 …

3 reasons why we should care about the health care experience

Suneel Dhand, MD

Physician

November 21, 2018

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 …

Why do we still use CD-ROMs for radiology images?

Paul Sax, MD

Physician

November 21, 2018

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 …

Is it still worth it to go to medical school?

Wall Street Physician, MD

Finance

November 21, 2018

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:

Doctor of Finance MD: A Late-Career Perspective On Medicine
Xrayvsn: Medicine …
Read more…

Is it still worth it to go to medical school?

Lewy body dementia and a farewell to a physician’s father

Janice Boughton, MD

Conditions

November 20, 2018

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 …

The psychological impact of quitting medicine

Smart Money, MD

Finance

November 20, 2018

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 …

Everything you ever wanted to know about croup

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

November 20, 2018

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, …

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