About six weeks ago, while in clinic, I developed pain in my stomach — specifically, in my right upper quadrant, just below the ribs. I had experienced this a few times before, but this time it seemed more persistent than usual. Following the rule that physicians make the worst patients, I kept working through it until my nurse told me I looked poorly, and made me see my own primary …
To meet Federal patient satisfaction goals, our hospital administration is requiring community based physicians to give patient admission orders before we have a chance to see the patient. Patients who self-refer themselves to the emergency department, are evaluated by the emergency room staff, and who are determined to require admission must be admitted by their community physician within 20 minutes of receiving a call from the ER staff advising the …
Imagine this scenario. You are a male health care provider and you complete an evaluation of a woman close to your age. You establish good rapport as you always do, she laughs at some of the same jokes you make with all patients, and she expresses delight that you are listening to her problems (unlike those other providers she says she has seen), feels you are helping her, and is …
An interview by MedCrunch with Ashley Wendel, MA, CMC, PDC, a Physician Executive Coach and Healthcare Organization Consultant dedicated to helping physicians create meaningful and sustainable change that positively impacts their professional lives.
MC: Thank you so much Ashley for your time!
Ashley: Thank you, I’m really happy to share anything I can.
MC: You are a physician coach, what are the most common problems you encounter in your practice?
Ashley: Well, for many …
I got home recently after a 14 hour day in the operating room with (predictably) a pair of really tired feet, which lead me to think about shoes, foot rubs, and the fact that no one ever talked to me about this in my training.
What kind of shoes should you wear in the hospital?
There’s a lot of walking in the hospital, but there’s even more standing. Running shoes don’t provide …
The principle of autonomy is one of the four guiding principles of medical ethics, the others being beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. It means that patients have the right to decide what is done to their own bodies. For children under eighteen, the age of majority, this means their parents decide for them. What happens when parents refuse a treatment that their child’s doctors recommend? (The right of a minor child …
The third year of medical school is definitely an interesting one. You leave the classroom and enter the big bad world of medicine, and you quickly realize that much of what you’ve learned is for naught. You also realize that the medical student next to you could become your best friend, or the bane of your existence — or fall anywhere along that spectrum. Here is a list of the …
When it comes to doctor- nurse interactions, when is enough, enough?
Recently, I dealt with an upsetting situation involving a physician and nurse. A little background: The nurse has been working on our unit for years (since it first opened). She is very smart and savvy when it comes to nursing. She constantly gets feedback from the patients as being one of the kindest, most thorough nurses. I look up to …
What causes a doctor to commit suicide?
A story about a radiation oncologist from Springfield, IL brought this strange case to my attention. Dr. Thomas G. Shanahan committed suicide by cutting his throat in November of 2011. He was respected in his field, having published many research papers and traveled the world helping to set up brachytherapy clinics in several countries. He also had been an acting alderman in his …
Political correctness and sensitivity training are interfering with medicine and healthcare. In a recent article published in the journal, Pediatrics, a group of researchers published their findings regarding parental perceptions of the terminology that doctors use to describe childhood obesity (ages 2 to 18). The researchers found that it was undesirable to use the term “fat,” “obese,” or “morbidly obese” because they were stigmatizing, blaming, and the least motivating to …
Cancer is a dreadful disease. Just dreadful. Make no mistake: I have tremendous respect for the awesome doctors who treat patients afflicted with it day after day. Still, paradoxically, I can’t help but notice that some of them have just as hard a time as do other doctors with caring for patients at the end of their lives. I believe a large part of their difficulty stems from the ridiculously …
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 42-year-old woman is evaluated for a 3-month history of progressive cervical lymphadenopathy, fatigue, night sweats, bilateral lower-extremity and abdominal wall edema, and a 4.5-kg (10.0-lb) weight gain. History is significant for three episodes of weight gain and facial and lower-extremity edema lasting 4 weeks in …
What exactly is the difference between a child psychologist and child psychiatrist? The two terms are frequently mistakenly interchanged, but the requirements for the two are considerably different.
To become a child psychologist, many programs require that you get an undergraduate degree in psychology, although some graduate programs will only require that you take the prerequisite sciences courses (biology, physical and social sciences, statistics, mathematics, etc.) before applying for the graduate …
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In my new role as one of the directors of an internal medicine training program, I help select new interns out of medical school for the three year training stint of residency.
At the end of residency, many graduates go on to subspecialty fellowships, another two to four year period of intensive training in fields like cardiology, nephrology, critical care etc.
For those that don’t choose a subspecialty, one choice remains: traditional …
Doctors inevitably come into spotlight, being at the front end of health care delivery. Sometimes seen as guardian angels restoring health and life, other times, greedy minds sucking resources while they carelessly harm and kill patients to fill their wallets. After experiencing, observing, and hearing from others like me, I wonder if doctors are given more responsibility than they can handle, often attributed more aura than they deserve and frequently …
Although as a medical student rheumatology was always associated with an air of mystery and complexity to me – factors which might have aroused a younger me had they been associated with a member of the opposite sex – the specialty didn’t catch my eye at all as an undergraduate. To a medical student cruising for medical action in the 1980′s, rheumatology wouldn’t have got as far as a first …
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Historically, American physicians and surgeons were fiercely independent practitioners, who owned their own practices, worked long days and maybe longer nights, made a good income, but saw little of their families. They trained in a male-dominated world in “residency,” so named originally because their extended 120 hour/week work schedule demanded them living in dormitory type residence adjacent to the hospital.
They developed long-standing professional commitment to their patients that superceded time …
Today, I want to review another article I wrote in last year. That article started with a confession: “I confessed that I ate lunch with a representative of a pharmaceutical company.”
I must now confess that I often eat lunch with representatives of pharmaceutical companies and I’m proud of it. At this stage of my career, I can well afford my own lunch. I could sit quietly and relax over a cup …
Physicians are not trained to interpret paintings, and most patients do not have a lifetime of artwork to analyze. However, a rare opportunity for both to occur is at the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition de Kooning: A Retrospective.
Wilem de Kooning, regarded as one of the most prolific American artists of the twentieth century, grounded himself in the Abstract Expression movement. The AbEx movement is widely associated and recognized with …
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Some medical schools have altered their admissions process by replacing the traditional applicant interview with the Multiple-Mini Interview (MMI). MMI resembles speed-dating: applicants rotate through numerous interview stations, where they act out scenarios and solve puzzles, sometimes alone and sometimes in groups. A July New York Times article presented a good overview of MMI, as implemented by Virginia Tech Carillon.
As you might expect, schools that have adopted MMI (UCLA and …
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