Being a medical student is a piece of cake. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
If someone says medical school is too demanding, then they shouldn’t be here in the first place. I can tell that you’re different. I can see that twinkle in your eye. You’re gonna make a great doctor someday. You need to cut these negative people out of your life; they’re only going to drag you down. …
Any debate as to whether chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a legitimate neurological malady that affects football players is slowly being put to bed. Repetitive hits to the head resulting in sub-concussive trauma and that concussions are the culprit here. Clinical findings associated with CTE include memory loss, depression, anxiety, violent behavior, mood disorders and heightened suicidality, among other impairments. It tends to progress with time and can lead to …
Preventing CTE is a no brainer
It was not so much the words as the overall tone of the interaction. The doctor-patient relationship had been generally affable. There was the usual exchange of pleasantries over the years. Questions about family, children, and grandchildren. It was a good relationship — until Harvey got sick, that is.
Originally, there was weight loss and fatigue. The initial physical exam and slew of testing showed nothing but a frail, cachectic, middle-aged …
When a physician gets yelled at
Why don’t doctors advocate for themselves? Or young doctors, at least. Maybe it’s because we’re bombarded with patient care, never ending-educational opportunities or the mountain of electronic medical records that still need signed.
Maybe it’s because it’s too overwhelming. Understanding and conquering the health care behemoth that organizations, third-party payers, and the government have created seems nearly impossible if you’re not already on your way to adding a master of health …
5 ways young physicians can advocate for themselves
Editor’s note: This article contains racial slurs essential to the story.
A few days ago at my breakfast table, over coffee and my usual peanut butter protein shake, I read Doug Brunk’s article in Family Practice News about gun violence. The article reminded me that on the same day in history (April 16th, 2007) that the Virginia Tech shooter killed 32 people and injured 23 others, 231 other gun casualties occurred …
The drip, drip, drip of hate in the U.S.
High performers constantly struggle with the issue of time management. The more things you are good at, the more people who think you have talent, the more opportunities you are presented with, the harder time management becomes. In order to manage your time, you must first grasp one crucial concept: You cannot “manage time,” you can only manage yourself and how you take advantage of time.
Time will march on no …
The key to time management is the ability to say no
A recent article and accompanying commentary in the journal Pediatrics describe what we currently know about children who have died from influenza over the past decade or more. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has collected information about this since the 2003-2004 influenza season. In that first report, there were 153 deaths. Since then there have been at least 100 influenza deaths annually among children. Several characteristics have not changed. …
Influenza in children: reducing the death rate
A doctor is working down their long list of patients, powering through the day, striving to use their skills to get them better. Some of the patients will be follow-ups who they already know; others will be brand new patients, who they are meeting for the first time. Of course, the job of any doctor is first and foremost to heal their patient in whatever way they can. That’s what …
Your patient has judged you 7 seconds after meeting you
About 30 miles east of LA, on the quiet tree-lined campus of Claremont Graduate University, sunlight pierces the ornately covered windows of a lower-level classroom in Harper Hall. A glow is cast upon the 25 students of Dr. Debbie Freund’s health policy course; PhD candidates and practicing physicians among them.
Many of these bright young scholars will go on to take leadership roles in health policy, public health, IT and medical research. I …
Stranger Things are happening in health care
Medicine is an honorable profession. We meet people at a vulnerable point in their lives — when it comes to cancer, it is often at their most vulnerable. In oncology, care is typically multidisciplinary, and one of the most important advances in my own professional career has been this team approach. To see a patient with …
Patients can live with metastatic cancer
We’re all human beings, but we’re not all alike.
Each person experiences pain differently, from an emotional perspective as well as a physical one, and responds to pain differently. That means that physicians like myself need to evaluate patients on an individual basis and find the best way to treat their pain.
Today, however, doctors are under pressure to limit costs and prescribe treatments based on standardized guidelines. A major gap looms …
Why physicians should respect the pain patients report
Basketball dreams
I had one dream throughout childhood. (It certainly wasn’t to be a seven-figure failure!)
To play basketball. Now before you start to criticize me for my grandiosity, the goal was more simple. I had no plans of playing in the NBA, or even college for that matter. I had one simple goal-make my high school basketball team.
Easy you say, right? Well, the team was super competitive, and most of my …
This physician wasn’t afraid to fail
Like most medical trainees my age, I step into the hospital with the entire knowledge base of the world in my pocket. I have apps on my phone to look up disease symptoms and diagnoses, reference drug doses and side effects, estimate the 10-year risk of having a heart attack, determine the correct timing and type of vaccine administration and screening tests, and even display the risks, benefits, and statistics …
Bridging the gap: medical training in the digital age
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I often speak on stages at conferences. I am often the only woman and sit on what some have called “manels.” I love to teach large groups, and I enjoy medical and leadership conferences.
I used to take pride being “the only woman” on stage.
Not anymore.
For years I would be on panels, and I would be the only woman. Many times I was given the “case presentation.” The more serious panel …
It’s time for women physicians to shine on stage
While our elected officials in Washington spin political rhetoric and quote scary statistics around the opioid epidemic, New Jersey was one of the first states to take actual action. In February of this year, New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal declared its plan of combat: a 24-hour response team, improvements to the prescription monitoring program, and over a million dollars in federal grants. In fact, the Office of …
The opioid crisis: Doctors cannot lose hope
For many years, I’ve held a brief huddle with my team every morning to make sure we are ready for the day: Anybody with complex problems coming in today? Anybody who’s been in the ER? How is Mrs. Jones’s husband over at the nursing home, is she worried about his condition? Where can we squeeze in more add-on’s?
Now other people have tried to hijack the word “huddle” for a completely …
When preventive care becomes upselling in medicine
“I can’t stand the site of blood!”
We’ve all heard that adage. Blood can provoke emotional reactions from even steely muscle-bound bodybuilders. We gastroenterologists routinely receive fearful phone calls from patients who have observed even minor rectal bleeding. Fortunately, in most of these cases, there is a benign explanation for the sanguinary seepage.
If blood repels you, then gastroenterology should not be on your short, or even long list of professions under …
A surprising cause of rectal bleeding
My wife and I have befriended multiple people with struggling marriages. Maybe this shouldn’t be a big surprise given the majority of marriages end in divorce. That said, every time we end up with friends struggling in marriage, it never gets any less challenging. Every single time we run into this challenge, I am reminded of some sage advice I received before I got married: “The three most common causes …
How physicians can save their marriage
I hadn’t thought about this call night in a while, as it happened three years ago. It came back into my consciousness this past week, when I re-experienced the events in a dream. (Of note, my stress dreams used to be about my car accident in 2014, which was a high-speed collision that left me in crutches. I guess I can now safely say that some call nights are actually …
When mansplaining kills patients
Many medical organizations have recently been promoting focused and individualized lab testing for routine screening or when pursuing a diagnosis. Research has shown that the “shotgun” approach to lab testing usually leads to further invasive testing which has not been proven to significantly alter morbidity or mortality.
Additionally, tests rely on pre-test probabilities and can have false-positive or negative results and …
A physician makes the case for some routine labs
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