Amy Faith Ho is an emergency physician. She can be reached at her self-titled site, Amy Faith Ho.
This is what life versus death looks like.
This is what medicine verses mortality looks like.
This is what science verses humanity looks like.
After a thoracotomy, a fellow ER doctor Dr. Mitch Li snapped this picture of the spilled blood and Propofol on the trauma bay floor.
Blood courses through every one of our veins to sustain life.
Propofol courses through our veins only when we’re on the brink of death.
Ever since I’ve seen …
We live in incredible times.
A time when a millennial with a YouTube account clears six-figures a year (sometimes, seven figures!) with just a computer and a webcam.
A time when a small-town girl with a love of fashion and an Instagram account can go from Nowheresville, America to front row at New York Fashion Week.
A time when the shy girl in the back of the classroom amasses a following of hundreds …
When I was a medical student, trying to forge my path on the clinical wards as a third year, there was a lot to turn me off the idea of a career in medicine entirely — sleep deprivation, early mornings, late nights, standing for hours on rounds, subsisting on diets of hospital graham crackers and off-brand peanut butter. However, what frosted me the most was constantly playing 6 degrees of …
They say you never forget your first crush. Or your first date. Or your first kiss.
And you don’t.
Just as we have landmarks events that shape us in the adolescence of our personal lives, physicians also have landmark events that shape them in the adolescence of medical training: residency.
No longer a child of medical school, needing constant supervision and clinical babysitting by elders, resident physicians start with a refreshingly nascent view …
The concept of “First, do no harm,” which is embedded in the oath that kicks off the careers of most new doctors in America, has become something of a surrogate for the practice of medicine. But it’s something of a false promise. Doctors routinely cause their patients harm. The oath we should be taking is, “Help others with …
I met a man recently who had wandered about life dragging the rotting corpse of his arm barely attached to the rest of his body for over a year. His limb carried such a pungent malodor he stopped eating months ago because the noxious stench of his own dripping pus made him perpetually nauseous. A former handyman, he had jimmied up a poor-man’s sling with a tattered Hanes undershirt. It too …
Imagine you are an ambitious new worker at a powerhouse institution. Your job performance is soaring, but you frankly work like a dog. Your weeks top out at 80 hours, you get maybe a single 24-hour block of time off every 7 days, you work weekends, and you often work up to 30 hours straight in one stint, sleep at work, and eat exclusively from food options in the building.
You …
I do a strange thing as a physician almost daily. I go to alcoholics and have them promise me they’ll go home and continue drinking. Then I release them back into the wild to do just that.
I’m an emergency physician at an urban hospital, and I see alcoholics every single shift, brought in by the ambulance “found down” — that is, found passed out in public places or belligerent on …
The sad thing is, I hardly remember the patient. Everything about her is just an overhead pediatric trauma alert followed by the flurry of cutting clothes off, throwing IV lines, and calling out our primary and secondary survey — “blown right pupil,” “unequal breath sounds,” “gross deformity to left ankle,” and then, “no pulses” — followed by the age-old barbaric resuscitation efforts that are now muscle memory to us, as …
July as a newly minted intern: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
The only analogy I can make is you feel like a middle school kid sitting in a PhD course, desperately trying to back-learn everything in a language of acronym alphabet soup you’ve never heard before.
If medical school is drinking from a fire hose, this is trying to sip from Niagara Falls. You have …
Becoming a doctor takes time, but those outside of medicine do not always realize how convoluted the process can be. Central to the perversion is the National Resident Matching Program (or “the Match”).
After college and the two years of classroom-based training in medical school, students are ushered into clinical training through third year core rotations in predetermined specialties. In the spring of their third year, students must decide on their …
There is a saying that you enter medical school wanting to help people but exit it wanting to help yourself. It may be a cynical view, but a realistic one. The criteria for being a good medical student are far different from being a good doctor. Medical education may be breeding a legion of self-serving, grade-grubbing, SOAP-note spewing machines rather than …
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