Aristotle said, “To avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing and be nothing.”
Sometimes I wish I was nothing; surely, that would just be so much easier. I screw up all of the time. And I hate it. My latest gaffe was killing our simulated patient by causing him to aspirate. I’m sure no one in my group is still persevering on the events that unfolded during the sim. I also really …
Meet Dr. Svetlana Kleyman, a powerhouse chief surgery resident with a heart of gold, who works 16-hour days and runs marathons in her free time. Just 18 months before she was to graduate from SUNY Downstate, she developed a spinal infection that left her paralyzed from the waist down. After months of rehab, she was cleared by her doctors to resume work …
We are all familiar with the statistics. Chronic conditions like obesity, hypertension, and diabetes are present in our population at unacceptably high and costly levels. More than 78 million American adults are obese, and more than 1 in 20 is extremely obese. About 70 million U.S. adults have hypertension with only 52 percent having the condition under control. Just over 29 million Americans have diabetes and an additional 86 million …
How would you react if you sent your sputtering car to the auto mechanic, and they stopped trying to diagnose the problem after 15 minutes? You would probably revolt if they told you that your time was up and gave back the keys.
Yet in medicine, it’s common for practices to schedule patient visits in 15-minute increments — often for established patients with less complex needs. Physicians face pressure to mind …
There are over 400 pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) in the USA, as most recently estimated by the Society of Critical Care Medicine. These units vary widely in size, from 4 or 5 beds to fifty or more. The smaller units are generally found in community hospitals; the larger ones are usually in academic medical centers, often in designated children’s hospitals, of which there are 220.
Given this size range, it is not …
I was saddened to hear that one of my favorite libertarians, the wonderful journalist John Stossel, has taken ill. True to form, however, he’s taking it in stride (he nonchalantly quipped, “seems I have lung cancer”), and I want to take this opportunity to wish him very well indeed. I enjoy his reporting and writing, and have learned a great deal from Mr. Stossel over the years.
But that doesn’t mean he’s always …
I remember seeing so many charts in my career on which the well-meaning emergency room physician wrote the following: “Follow up with your primary care doctor.” Or, if they didn’t have one, “Follow up in one week with a primary care doctor.” I laughed to myself. Usually, the people we say that to have either no insurance, inadequate insurance or inadequate motivation to even call the persons to whom we …
Thanks to all the nurses who take care of my patients and every other patient. I may be a doctor, but you are the ones who deliver the care. You give the medications and hang the IV fluids. You wash the patients and turn them. You check their vitals and listen for bowel sounds. You walk with them. You talk with them. You fulfill their needs. And you provide comfort to …
Once upon a time, there was a man who was a very good cook. He was just an ordinary man, but he had real culinary talents. He could create the perfect meal for anyone who came to see him in his modest café.
His maître d’ and waiting staff were warm and well trained, and the menu was designed specifically for the clientele of his eatery. He gave each person his …
In 1991, I took a sub-internship in cardiology with a clinically-minded attending named Eddie Atwood. One day he stopped me in the hall: “You have a few minutes toward the end of the day?”
“Sure. What’d I do?” I just knew some sort of defining verdict headed toward my Dean’s letter, to be shown to all residencies and preserved in an archive of medical student iniquities, was surely coming.
“You students are …
USMLE Step exams are a rite of passage in medical education. They mark the transition from pre-clinical years to clinical years, from medical school to residency and from intern to resident. One of the more difficult aspects of the transition to residency was convincing myself that I really was a doctor. The habits of explaining my role as a student, of hedging every statement with “I’ll need to ask the …
Medicine can wear down our hearts and souls. My journey in pediatrics has been filled with many rewarding experiences but haunting ones as well, like this one from my third year of residency. By that final year of training, I was no longer certain medicine was really the right choice for me. I was struggling with the notion that after almost 11 years of education, the destination was not quite …
Life as a resident doctor can bring some of the most memorable patients encounters of our career. After all, this is the time in our training when we are the most naïve, vulnerable and most importantly impressionable. There is a certain patient scenario, however, which has changed the way I view one the most important experiences a patient can have: labor.
Let me explain.
I get paged for an epidural. Once I …
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Maybe it’s just me, and maybe this is a regional/local phenomenon, but I have noticed a sharp increase in the number of non-physicians who sport their white coats on a daily basis around the hospital.
First, let me preface this piece by saying I have absolutely nothing against any person who partakes in the care of patients; in fact, I commend all the helping hands that routinely dedicate themselves to health …
I’ll just start this off by saying that I am not exactly sure where I stand on the white coat thing. One part of me loves the white coat as a symbol, a shield against disease, and a place with pockets to put my things; and then there are other days when I just want to throw that germ-ridden cotton barrier to the doctor-patient relationship in the trash, roll up my sleeves, …
I was 13 years old when I first had thoughts related to suicide. While my thoughts never really included calculated ways of ending my life, I remember such a profoundly overwhelming desire to be anesthetized to all of my emotions and worries. In the medical field, that kind of thinking is classified under the label of “suicidal ideation,” which is often accompanied by other diagnoses of mental illness. I have …
Just three weeks earlier, she had noticed something strange about one of her breasts. An irregular shape. Her daughter brought her to the doctor, and soon the patient, I’ll call her Amanda, was diagnosed with breast cancer, stage “to be determined.” In fact, she was now in an oncologist’s office, learning what tests she would receive to determine the extent of her tumor. And sitting between her and the doctor …
Guilt was not a huge part of my vocabulary until I became a mom. I never felt much guilt about how I spent my time. Didn’t feel guilty about sleeping in, or working out, or having a girls’ night out. And so on and so forth.
And then I became a mom. You know, that moment when you get shoved into the most beautiful world; a place more beautiful than you could …
I have a lot of ER stories that involve drug addiction and drug seeking behavior. I knew a patient who intentionally dislocated his shoulder three times in one day to receive pain medication. Another had a friend who stole an entire dirty needle box in order to rummage through it for injectable drugs.
I have been told by patients that pain pills were eaten by dogs, stolen by neighbors, lost in …
I thought about the rather corny starfish story when I was driving home after clinic today. You know the one. It goes something like this:
A man was walking along a deserted beach at sunset. As he walked, he could see a young boy in the distance. As he drew nearer, he noticed that the boy kept bending down, picking something up and throwing it into the water. Time and again …
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