These articles are written by anonymous clinicians. They have been selected and edited by Kevin Pho, MD.
Almost two years ago I went to the funeral of a medical school classmate. A little more than three weeks before he had jumped from a parking garage after finishing his clinic. He had a loving wife and three young children. He had the respect of his colleagues and the love of his patients. There was nothing out of the ordinary in his financial or personal life. It didn’t make …
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It is February of our last few months of clinical rotations. I am a rising fourth-year medical student at a well-known East Coast institution with a not-so-bad track record, I guess you could say. I scored in the top percentile for the USMLE Step 1, honored my third-year rotations, and have comments from attendings about how I am destined to succeed in this career. One might think that at this point …
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The workplace environment can be full of many obstacles, especially in the medical field. These obstacles range from difficult patients, to navigating insurances, to burnout, and so on. One problem, however, appears to be worsening over time and seems to go without discussion. As life has progressed and I have transitioned from a medical student to attending physician, I have noticed an increase in workplace confrontation between employees. Is this …
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What do you do when you love your job, but it’s killing you?
That’s an easy question if it’s asked by someone else. It’s a hard question when you’re asking it of yourself. As a physician, I give advice to people all the time — other people. If you have diabetes, control your diet. If you are obese, then lose weight and exercise. If you have COPD, then you better not …
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I thought about you, the patient that I’m about to perform surgery on, all night last night and because I doubted myself, I took clonazepam to calm the anxiety so I could sleep. Today I’ve taken 10 mg of propranolol and some Kava, a natural supplement known to decrease anxiety.
As I start the surgery, the propranolol coursing through my veins blocking the sympathetic nervous system, I fear it will come. …
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Every time I walk through the automatic sliding doors, that strong smell of ammonia stings my nose. The lobby is clean — too clean — with a vast amount of open space leading to the front desk. The just-below-comfortable air brushes against my skin, raising the hair on my arms and legs. Almost cold enough to be a morgue — but that’s later. The room is silent, except for the …
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The human experience is an exercise in connection. Nothing is seen, heard, or felt in isolation. This is what can make womanhood in a large urban city so challenging. A catcall is not a single comment, heard on a single morning about the tightness of your jeans or the way your hair falls; but instead carries with it every unsolicited thing you’ve ever heard about your body, a shadow of …
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“I quit residency.”
Three words that many physicians couldn’t ever imagine coming out of their mouth, but for me, I say it all the time, usually with a smile on my face. I was a year and a half into my family medicine residency and decided it was enough. My decision mostly revolved around the birth of my son. My husband (a resident in the same program) and I planned to …
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I did some pretty crazy things to get into medical school (don’t worry, Mom, nothing illegal). For several years before applying, I became a medicine groupie. I read books about being a doctor, watched documentaries about medicine, and shadowed physicians for hours on end so I could imagine what it might be like. I watched many a friend go off to med school and graduate … and I waited, I …
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I started medical school recently. Before it started, I told myself (and everybody else) that I would feel like a kid in a candy shop when I was here. I’d get to try different specialties and figure out which one I want to do out of everything that excited me. It really is kind of like that, don’t get me wrong. But I’m also confused and disheartened.
I had a different …
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One word: gun. That is all it takes to spark a debate between two very different camps. One end of the spectrum feels guns are an evil haunting the nation by their mere existence, and they need to be dealt with by restricting (or even eliminating) everyone’s ability to possess them. The other end believes it is a core right to keep and use firearms for sport, personal defense, collecting, etc., and that no …
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Netflix listens to doctors. Google, Facebook, and Apple listen to doctors. The United States Navy and Marine Corps listen.
The above companies have updated their maternity leave policies — lengthening them all past 12 weeks. And all paid.
But yet, health care doesn’t listen to doctors. And let me tell you how.
I am pregnant. Which is a blessing in of itself. In fact, this is my 4th pregnancy, but I only have one child living. …
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“Doctor, I am ready to die.”
I knew her from a few years back. This patient of mine.
I am a hospitalist and the patients in my care come and go, making it difficult to really form relationships like the ones primary care physicians have with their panel of patients. But this patient was different. I saw her once many years ago when she was gravely ill, and we managed to pull her …
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“You work here?!”
I nodded, a hint of a smile revealing my bemusement at his incredulity.
“Well … probably not after this.”
The other patients in the psych waiting area of the ER nodded in agreement. In my newly issued brown scrubs, stripped of my belongings, I was no longer a research coordinator at a top hospital, but rather one of them. And sadly, they believed being one of them meant you couldn’t …
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The refusal of blood products by the Jehovah’s witnesses has often been cited as a great example of patient religious freedom triumphing over the traditional paternalism of medicine. Patients are free to refuse transfusion even at the risk of death. Many hospital-based physicians have, at one time or another, been witness to the demise of a patient refusing blood products, perhaps a preventable demise. Patient autonomy is held to be …
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I’m supposed to speak at the body donor memorial in September. I told the organizers my speech was written. “Don’t worry,” I assured them. “I have it all in my head, just need to get it down on paper. I’m a writer; it’s my process.” But the truth is that I am struggling with what to say. I’ve tried to write it, but I just end up drinking a pot …
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My idealism has been stolen. No other way to express how I feel just days past my third anniversary from graduating from fellowship. Post college, I spent thirteen additional years in training to become the specialist physician I am. I am reminded now of my Facebook post stating I was about to start my first “real job” with a picture of the beautifully lit signs at night of the university …
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Let me be the first to admit that my mind’s internal and unspoken dialogue produces scathing critiques of the people whose behavior or ideologies are divergent from my own. This isn’t to say that I intentionally treat anyone differently because of personal differences that I observe.
On the contrary, I make a conscious effort to make my actions and spoken words consistent among everyone with whom I interact, particularly when I’m …
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I was an overachieving, well-rounded and sagacious undergraduate student. I majored in psychology, minored in biology and was an active member of the Psi Chi honor society. I was drawn to the study of psychology, and fascinated by the complexities of mental illness. I became certified as a research assistant and spent many hours with severely depressed individuals, who had become crippled by their illness. I was intensely intrigued by …
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Doctors and nurses said patients and their families created the largest obstacles to end-of-life decision-making in the ICU in a large survey published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
About 1,300 staff at 13 academic hospitals in Canada rated barriers to end-of-life goals of care on a 1 to 7 scale. Doctors and nurses considered the largest barriers to end-of-life …
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