I am a physician, but I also consider myself a mother hen. When I have a census of patients, I think of them as little chicks, perhaps old roosters, clucking hens, tender capons. Some are old, some young, some have been chased out of the coop by an angry dog, caught in the wires and sent to me for care. Some …
We need fewer paternalistic physicians and more maternal ones
The lipstick sign is an underutilized physical examination finding which can assist in the evaluation and assessment of the elderly female patient. While poorly applied lipstick can result in considerable embarrassment and anxiety in this patient population, those who present with properly applied lipstick demonstrate mastery of multiple domains of functioning.
Fine motor skills and concentration can be correlated with a positive …
Consider the lipstick sign in your next physical exam
Nobody, it seems, is comfortable with death. In Haiti, where death and life are fluid concepts, where voodoo curses and ghosts are spoken of as fact rather than fiction, death is comfortably present. The dead are buried in mass graves throughout the country, victims of political crime, violence, malnourishment and infectious disease. There, life can be drained from a healthy person in a matter of hours for lack of clean …
While demographic data may suggest otherwise, I still consider myself a minority, albeit a less common one. I am a young woman in medicine, and I am a natural blonde.
I barely qualify for a prescription for eyeglasses, but I have found they give credence to my words and patients seem to take me more seriously. Perhaps three years of residency training …
The blonde minority: Sexism is alive in medicine
Somewhere late morning, after rounding on my first day of internship, I received a call from my sister.
“She wants to kill herself. What do I do?”
We had been through this before with our mother, fifteen years ago, the week I moved out of her house. She ended up in the psychiatric unit as we packed our bags to move in with our grandmother. This time, fifteen years later, things were …
Medicine has allowed me to intellectualize my mother’s illness
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