“He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I was a third-year medical student on a Sunday morning when the reality of what I had chosen as my life career truly hit me in the gut. At that moment, I realized how intimate the practice of medicine was and that I would have to bring not only my brain and skills to work …
Doctors: Don’t emotionally detach
Hate your job? You may be in the right profession, but the wrong position for your personality. Want to love your life and career? Step one: discover whether you are an employee, a business owner or an entrepreneur.
Here’s how to figure it out:
Employees are risk averse and like to know the rules. They thrive on structure and predictability. They need clear instructions …
Doctors: Are you employees, business owners or entrepreneurs?
This is a tough post to write. I struggle with this issue daily. Is it OK for a physician to retire early? The obvious answer is: yes. Each individual should live their life as they see fit. But with a continued shortage of physicians (granted this is more in rural areas and not big metropolitan cities), and the time, money and resources required for training physicians, is it selfish to …
Is it OK for a physician to retire early?
The Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine has on its website this quote:
The current focus on diagnostic error raises an interesting question: Is this a larger problem in 2017 than in the 1970s and 1980s?
In this post, I …
We must make the word “diagnostician” the most prestigious term in medicine
We in the medical community believe wholeheartedly in the prevention of all illness, especially by vaccination. Science and history continue to show that vaccination dramatically decreases both the mortality (death rate) and morbidity (severity of illness) of infectious diseases. And, more than 98 to 99 percent of the general population (non-medical) agrees with those statements as well.
Yes, it is absolutely frustrating when parents refuse to follow our advice and protect …
Why pediatricians should not kick out unvaccinated children
Competition often works. Competing dry cleaners or donut shops must either improve the quality of their product or keep their prices low, or customers will go somewhere else for their cruller fix. In time, the better businesses — the ones that provide tastier pastries at a lower price — will thrive, and less-good, more-expensive businesses will go away. In the long run, all customers benefit from competition between businesses.
That’s how …
The problem with the free market in health care
An excerpt from The Other Side of the Bed: What Patients Go Through and What Doctors Can Learn.
As soon as I’d opened my mouth, I regretted it. In the hospital, it’s bad luck to say “It looks quiet,” or anything to that effect. At the sound of those words, …
A code in the cath lab that was unlike anything I had ever seen
In his famous novel, Moneyball, Michael Lewis illustrates the phenomenon of professional baseball scouts focusing on all the wrong characteristics when looking at players. He describes how scouts focus on fastball velocity as a way to compare pitchers, despite the lack of correlation between fastball speed and the quality of a pitcher. As it turns out, the most important factor in a pitcher is deception, not a high-velocity fastball. The …
Residents need to learn medicine, not how to pass a test
Victim: Female nurse, age 25
Time: circa 1980
Place: A hospital in a sleepy Southern town with fifty beds, six emergency department beds, one nurse, one doctor and one secretary.
It was an unusually quiet Friday night in this small emergency department.
We all knew Friday was “party day”: pay day, play day, alcohol, pills, drugs, loud music and lots of really bad decisions.
Not only did we cover the entire city, but we also …
A nurse was attacked in the emergency department. This is her story.
To me, five years ago:
Right now you are 28, seated at the top of everything: chief resident of the entire pediatric department. You are in charge of 19 other interns and residents. You are resilient, kind, funny and determined. You seem to have the solution for everything, yet you don’t actually have the answer to anything. At least that’s how you’ll feel on most days in your new leadership role. …
As a physician, you will fail at your job in these different ways. Learn from them.
Physicians have so many tools available to us that can turn them into powerful health care influencers.
A KevinMD keynote video excerpt. I’m currently considering opportunities for 2018: Please visit my physician keynote speaking page to find out more.
Turn physicians into powerful health care influencers
Most people reading this would love to lose weight, feel better and live longer. Doctors are a smart and motivated group of people. Unfortunately, that intellect and drive has not prevented us from avoiding an increasing incidence of obesity, diabetes, and hypertension identical to the general population.
While this article may have started out sounding like an infomercial, I promise it will not end like one. …
Doctors: You’re just as unhealthy as your patients. Here’s why.
Imagine taking the MCAT, applying to schools, getting interviews and even being accepted into medical school. How would it feel knowing your dedication has paid off? I felt great, as I had studied hard and made sacrifices others were unwilling to make. As I saw the finish line for what would be the beginning of medical school, I began to ask myself, “Should I continue onwards toward medical school or …
Why I got into medical school and chose not to go
When I entered college, I wanted to be a chemistry major. I had no idea what college chemistry would be like, but it was the class I loved most in high school and something I was pretty good at. The town I grew up in had little more than 3,000 people and more gas stations than stop lights. My school didn’t have Advanced Placement classes or partnerships with local hospitals …
Love something other than medicine? It’s OK.
Antibiotics save lives, but antibiotics can have negative effects. When patients have bacterial infections, we want to treat them to prevent complications of the bacterial infection, but not treat them for an excessive duration. So we have a Goldilocks problem — we want antibiotic duration to be just right — neither too short or too long.
Some clinical conditions have adequate research to define the Goldilocks duration. Community acquired pneumonia only …
How long should I take antibiotics? Exploring the Goldilocks problem.
“OK, one more patient to go,” I said to myself with my eyes quickly scanning the patient list in my hands. I was in the elevator, going up the spanking new glass tower in the giant tertiary care hospital I call my workplace. Today was turning out to be a better Monday than usual. I had worked over the weekend, so I knew the patients. And there were no major …
Inappropriate patient behavior is not OK
Fireworks, champagne toasts, sparkly hats, and the ball drop are all items that we conger up in our minds as we think of the New Year. For the majority of the world, January 1st represents the transition from one year to another on the calendar. New resolutions are made, and there is a global fresh start. However, for those of us in the medical field, there is another new year …
3 reasons why July 1st should be a day to celebrate
I feel privileged to be practicing medicine. Many people consider doctor careers and imagine how great it may be. Is it the right thing for you? Yes there are days of frustration, exhaustion, and utter defeat, but at the end of the day I home and know that I helped at least one person if not two from the 16 I meet.
The fact that I alleviated one individual’s anxiety or …
10 reasons why being a doctor is a privilege
In the spirit of World Breastfeeding Week, I want to highlight all we can about breastfeeding; why it’s great for you and your baby, some ways to make it easier, and how to manage common challenges.
But one challenge that often gets ignored in the offices of doctors and lactation consultants is the issue revolving around the ethics of breastfeeding. That is, addressing uncomfortable questions like these:
Let’s talk about the ethics of breastfeeding
There are two schools of thought about how to extubate patients at the conclusion of general anesthesia:
Allow the patient to wake up with the endotracheal tube in place, gagging on the tube and flailing like a fish on a line, while someone behind the patient’s head bleats, “Open your eyes! Take a deep breath!”
Or:
Remove the endotracheal tube while the patient is still sleeping peacefully, which results in the smooth emergence …
Deep extubation is a useful technique for any anesthesiologist to master
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