Joan Naidorf is an emergency physician and author of Changing How We Think about Difficult Patients: A Guide for Physicians and Healthcare Professionals.
During her treatment for acute leukemia, my friend Susan came to me for help and advice while she was in the hospital receiving chemotherapy. I also did her laundry. She went to one of the specialists at a major tertiary care center and had access to the lengthy consultation written by the oncologist. Susan had a career as a highly respected and much-loved elementary school principal in our county school …
In the very realistic fictional world of The White Coat Diaries by Dr. Madi Sinha, a first-year internal medicine resident goes through a harsh initiation into the realities of medical training. Protagonist Norah Kapadia encounters a complication of a penile implant in an elderly patient with end-stage liver disease and dementia. Her senior resident talks her through the problem of causing hematuria as she placed a catheter through an …
An excerpt from Changing How We Think About Difficult Patients: A Guide for Physicians and Healthcare Professionals.
After I finished my residency in EM and started working as an attending physician, I realized I had a problem. I believe a lot of you have the same problem. Some of our patients are so angry, oppositional, and non-compliant that we get angry …
We’re getting into trouble. With headlines like “Why I am angry” and “Burnout rates at an all-time high,” physicians need to take a moment and breath. Unvaccinated people are presenting as very difficult patients that physicians dread.
In his landmark article, “Taking Care of the Hateful Patient,” Dr. James Groves highlighted four distinct patient types that doctors shrink from. Hateful patients are noted to cause negative feelings in …
The Washington Post published an interesting article in its weekly health section on March 2. 2021. The article had an impactful graphic using data from the Centers for Disease Control that showed the number of pediatric deaths due to influenza over the last four years.
Of course, this was a flu season and year unlike any other. In 2020, around mid-March, Americans became aware of a newly …
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