Post Author: Jordan Grumet, MD

Jordan Grumet is an internal medicine physician, host of the Earn & Invest Podcast, and author of Taking Stock: A Hospice Doctor’s Advice on Financial Independence, Building Wealth, and Living a Regret-Free Life.
He has worked in academic as well as private practices, served as medical director of several nursing homes, and created palliative care programs for skilled nursing facilities.
He is a writer and storyteller who has been published in Medical Economics, the Pharos, the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the Journal of General Internal Medicine. His book, I Am Your Doctor And This Is My Humble Opinion, was published in 2015, and followed by Five Moments: Short Works of Fiction in 2017.
Jordan shares his stories at conferences nationwide, highlighted by an acclaimed performance at the dotMD conference in Dublin, Ireland.
Jordan speaks about the following topics:
- Bridging the intimacy gap between physician and patient
- Caring 2.0: Social media and the rise of the empathic physician
- Hospice and the way of the master clinician
- Doctor and society: An hour of storytelling
He is a member of Physician Speaking by KevinMD and is available for speaking opportunities. Please contact us for inquiries.

Jordan Grumet is an internal medicine physician, host of the Earn & Invest Podcast, and author of Taking Stock: A Hospice Doctor's Advice on Financial Independence, Building Wealth, and Living a Regret-Free Life.
He has worked in academic as well as private practices, served as medical director of several nursing homes, and created palliative care programs for skilled nursing facilities.
He is a writer and storyteller who has been published in Medical Economics, the Pharos, the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the Journal of General Internal Medicine. His book, I Am Your Doctor And This Is My Humble Opinion, was published in 2015, and followed by Five Moments: Short Works of Fiction in 2017.
Jordan shares his stories at conferences nationwide, highlighted by an acclaimed performance at the dotMD conference in Dublin, Ireland.
Jordan speaks about the following topics:
- Bridging the intimacy gap between physician and patient
- Caring 2.0: Social media and the rise of the empathic physician
- Hospice and the way of the master clinician
- Doctor and society: An hour of storytelling
He is a member of Physician Speaking by KevinMD and is available for speaking opportunities. Please contact us for inquiries.
I was spiking a fever.
It was as if someone flipped a light switch inside my body. I could feel the sensation rise through the chest, and trample the dazed contents of my skull. Light, however, was a poor, lazy metaphor. There was no heat, only stimulation.
My belly ached from the repetitive heaving that preceded the fever. I envisioned the sandwich I had eaten that afternoon. I pictured small bacteria crowding …
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There was nothing wrong with Sarah’s vocal cords. Her tumor had spread throughout the abdomen, but her voice was unaffected. Yet minutes after learning of the voraciousness of her metastases, she pursed her lips and began to communicate with head nods and hand gestures only.
I met her for the first time in the nursing home. I sat down quietly at her bedside on a Sunday morning. I was in the …
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We were pretty damn lucky that she was young and healthy.
The surgery had been technically successful. I watched as the resident finished with the last sutures. Although the attending had already left the room, I looked on with the eagerness of a third year student. Orders were written, and the patient was transferred to recovery.
It was a routine hysterectomy. None of the pizazz and flare of a gynecology-oncology surgery, but …
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If Hattie had but one flaw, it was that she held her doctors in too high esteem. It was not unusual for an eighty-year-old woman of her culture to want to please her cardiologist. So when her blood pressure came up a little high, she was too embarrassed to admit that she had forgotten to pick up the Toprol and hadn’t taken it in over a week.
The cardiologist hemmed and …
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It was the same years ago in residency. There was both a categorical and primary care residency track. Each had their own distinctive curriculum and rotation schedule. The outpatient track did more time in the clinic, the categorical more on the hospital wards. We trained side by side. We attended many of the same lectures. And our fellowship choices matched identically. In fact, most of my colleagues from the primary …
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Dear patients,
It has been a hard week. I wanted to take a moment to personally apologize for all that you have endured. As one who has witnessed your pains and struggles, I can only wince with each new passing hurdle you are forced to leap over. This business of disease and illness is not for the weak of heart (metaphorically, that …
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A study in JAMA suggested that physicians feel that other players (lawyers, insurance companies, hospitals, etc.) are more responsible than doctors for reducing healthcare costs. Furthermore, they are hesitant to promote reforms that eliminate the current fee for service payment system.
Although I would bet the no one would be surprised by these findings, a scathing editorial by Ezekiel Emanuel and Andrew Steinmetz caught my eye. Before I get to …
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Monday afternoons are always the same. I pick up the kids from their grandparents. We drive home with their backpacks and a carton of home made food. We park in the garage, and carry all the contents of the car into the house. As the kids unload, I push the recycle container to the front for street pickup the next day.
Occasionally, I stop and socialize. Yesterday, I waited at the edge …
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I guess what is so utterly frustrating is that the guys up there don’t see what is going on down here. The march of health care reform continues with little realization of what it feels like to be one of the tiny peon foot soldiers on the ground. We are not deaf. We hear the politicians and policy wonks. We read as non-clinician “doctors,” ivory towered administrators, and the business …
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My first instinct was to yell into the phone as loudly as possible.
“Run away, run away while you still have time.”
But I suspected that the medical student on the the other side of the mobile would have been traumatized. She was just trying to find an attending to shadow. How was she supposed to know that at that exact moment the nursing home administrator had pulled out thousands of computer …
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It was just like every other email I had gotten in the past. A young student at a local university was interested in primary care, and wanted to shadow me for a month between his second and third years. I responded swiftly. I was delighted to bolster the interest in my specialty. Over the years I had helped train students, residents, nurses, and nurse practitioners. By exposing them to the office, hospital, nursing …
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Many ask of our profession, “Are you knight or knave?”
The supposition, that there exists a dichotomy of options for the current physician, is a false one. Likely we are a little bit of both, and many shades in between. The maddening belief that the future of our healthcare system depends on this delineation is preposterous. I would more aptly characterize us as pawns.
The time for change has come.
After patiently listening to my …
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If you listen to the pundits, the future of medicine is big: big medicine, big data. And indeed the healthcare policy of our nation is couched in the promise of what is to come. Many dictates of the accountable care act focus on the ability to aggregate and consume a variety of inputs. ICD-10, EMRs, and meaningful use all tie nicely into a beautiful computational orgy.
Big data, however, has it drawbacks. One wonders if in …
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It’s not exactly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but everybody knows my level of patience varies from time to time. So I was surprised to find myself happily telling the emergency room that I would assess the patient shortly. The kids were horsing around on the playground, and I knew I would have to call my wife and ask her to come home. It would be my second 45 minute trip to the hospital on …
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I couldn’t really blame the social worker. He was just doing his job. The skilled nursing facility (SNF) connected to the hospital was full of flailing patients. So he thought he would ask for a palliative care consult (after getting an okay from the primary team). It was his third request of the day. He spoke slowly as he tried to untangle the twisted path the patient had taken.
“Dr. X …
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Below find excerpts of an email sent by a faithful reader. I have included the whole text, but broken it down to respond to each point accordingly.
I have really enjoyed your blog postings and the sensitivity you showed toward patients. But, your new venture is a real turn off, and makes it hard for me to want to read your posts anymore.
I have been waiting for this. Expecting it. I knew …
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You get to know people after a few days in paradise, sitting on lawn chairs in front of the pool. You talk about where you’re from and your kids (if you have them). You might spout off about your job or friends. These are the pleasant conversations exchanged between vacationing strangers.
You may learn that one of them has taken ill: woken up perchance on a beautiful idyllic …
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The sweat coalesced on my forehead. I leaned forward to push the weight of my body into the wheel chair. I was terrified. Behind me strode the baffled parents with their arms full of coats and scarves. The young boy shrunk into the chair and balanced his IV’ed arm on the rest, trying not to disrupt the tubing that had been so painfully inserted.
I was lost. A week into my rotation as a volunteer …
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I almost fell off my chair. It was bad enough that he showed up to the ER. But what happened next really blew my mind. He fell and bruised a rib. The pain in his left chest had obvious enough origins. But triage had put in for an electrocardiogram and the interpretation apparently scared the resident. The attending took a look, and shook his head.
“Left bundle branch block. Better call …
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It had all been so easy when Jim was still around. Lisa’s ex-husband had many shortcomings, but being a critical care specialist sure came in handy. Any time her mom or dad had a health crisis, he was right there in the middle of it: advocating, interpreting, breaking down the complexities into easily digestible morsels of information. But then Lisa’s father died, and the emotional and physical stress brought the unstable union …
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