As a physician, you are required to have keen senses. Touch, smell, hearing, and sight are absolute necessities for most practicing physicians while we can only hope that taste is reserved for meals and non-professional situations. I recently returned from a week of vacation in the great outdoors and found myself wishing that I had more olfactory agnosia. Olfactory is a Latin adjective from olfacere that translates “of or relating …
The job of being a doctor can sometimes be like that of your favorite sidewalk juggler. It used to be that a good family doctor would have to show up in the clinic for a couple of hours, make a few house calls, and be available if anyone needed him while he played a round of golf in the afternoon. (Really, this is quite an exaggeration but it sets the …
Patient-doctor communication often has many facets, wrinkles, and twists. Medical school prepares a doctor minimally for the ups and downs of these patient interactions. There is no mannequin who can train each medical student how to deal with every personality, response, or even outburst by each patient. On the job training is sine qua non.
During and after medical school, it took …
As a little kid, I used to love the bedtime story about Humpty Dumpty and his fall from the wall. “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.” Until recently, I never thought about this story as a logical and sad analogy to …
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