Craig Bowron is an internal medicine physician and author of Man Overboard!: A Medical Lifeline for the Aging Male.

Gratitude takes practice. How come health care workers aren’t better at it?

Physician
March 8, 2023

Like interest rates and food prices, burnout among health care providers continues to rise.

From my perch—as a hospitalist in a large tertiary hospital—the sheer terror of the early days of the COVID pandemic has been replaced by a grinding fatigue fueled by staffing shortages across the entire health care system.

Patients and their families are burned out too, frustrated by delays and shortcomings in care that inevitably arise in an overworked …

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Gratitude takes practice. How come health care workers aren’t better at it?

A death knell for cadavers

Education
August 30, 2022

If “video killed the radio star” and Zoom squelched the commute, it seems certain that virtual reality and three-dimensional imaging will be the death knell for cadavers.

Recently, NBC Nightly News did a story featuring staff members from Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine using the metaverse and 3D imaging to map out the details of an upcoming complex brain surgery. No matter that the four participants were in different …

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A death knell for cadavers

Bloated notes are a huge problem and a time suck

Physician
May 4, 2021

In a moment of caffeine-depleted delirium, I volunteered to head the creation of a “notes committee” for my 80-member hospitalist group.

I placed myself on a 72-hour hold and quickly established a group consensus: “Bloated notes are a huge problem and a time suck. I’m glad you [rather than me] are working on this. My notes are fine, though. It’s other people’s notes that are bad. Other people’s bad notes are …

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Bloated notes are a huge problem and a time suck

Hospitals run on much more than doctors and nurses, so spread the love

Conditions
March 23, 2020

As a hospitalist in Minnesota, my colleagues and I are busy preparing for the coming viral storm. It is starting to rain. We read the harrowing front line stories from overwhelmed hospitals in China, Italy, and now here in the U.S., and reach for a sublingual Zofran tablet to calm the nauseous dread.

The smart and intuitive “flatten the curve” graphic has made a strong case to the public for why …

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Hospitals run on much more than doctors and nurses, so spread the love

Should only infectious disease specialists be allowed to prescribe antibiotics?

Meds
August 9, 2017

The WHO’s recent announcement of multi-drug resistant strains of gonorrhea raises the specter of a worldwide SuperClap Attack that even the Avengers couldn’t foil. It also comes as yet another ominous reminder of the perils of rampant and indiscriminate antibiotic use.

There’s plenty of blame to spread around. True, here in the U.S., consumers can’t buy antibiotics over the counter, but that hasn’t kept physicians and other providers from over-prescribing them …

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Should only infectious disease specialists be allowed to prescribe antibiotics?

Am I a health care business metric or a physician?

Policy
February 24, 2016

The title of Noam Scheiber’s January 9, 2016 New York Times piece on hospitalists, “Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine,” skirts the bigger issue for doctors, which has less to do with contracts, salaries and labor relations, and much more to do with the question, “Is health care just another business, and if so, can physicians be managed that way?”

I’m a silverback hospitalist, and when I started …

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Am I a health care business metric or a physician?

Board certification is no guarantee of excellent patient care

Physician
July 26, 2015

When a doctor makes a mistake, it’s rarely out of ignorance.  We usually have the knowledge we need. Instead, most medical mistakes happen because we’re tired, distracted, hurried, or indifferent — or maybe some combination of those things.

Since physicians rarely publicize their personal frazzled-and-frenzied, pooped-out or burned-out quotients, health care consumers shopping for a doctor often consider Board certification as a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval. The “board” …

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Board certification is no guarantee of excellent patient care