I was sitting in my car on the phone when I heard the news. My boyfriend and I were chatting while I was driving to my parents’ house to have dinner. He mentioned to me that he had something to tell me and wanted to wait until I had stopped driving and had a chance to had dinner. My stomach is strong from having little time to eat and lots …
Doctoring during Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal
It was a Monday two years ago. I was still fresh from coming back from having been out of school from a COVID break. I was no older than 22, and I was in my pediatrics clerkship. I was greener than a freshly watered lawn, and I felt every bit of it. It was one day into this rotation that I met Adam.
He was a 7-year-old boy the size of …
A story of medicine’s stolen children
Mentorship is one of the cornerstones of growth as a clinician and student. Given that so much of medicine is learned outside of a classroom and through individual experiences, mentorship helps to clearly round out these experiences and help us grow as clinicians. I remember starting medical school and being told at every corner to look for mentors. I wanted to make sure that I was able to grow at …
Formalized mentorship as a requirement for medical schools
Shellee Cohen defines “stratified reproduction” as the practice in which society assigns value to offspring and, therefore reproductive capacity of different groups of people. While commonly race or socioeconomically based, this can be based on any category we can divide people. This concept is ever-present in medicine, even in the most progressive environments. This became most evident when I was sitting at my desk in an outpatient gynecology office, clicking …
Stratified reproduction in medicine
As I progress further in my medical career, I often feel that there are expectations of me that I have never been trained for. Teaching and feedback are large parts of my training that I do not always feel we are adequately prepared for. Feedback constitutes a large part of how we become better physicians. However, this commonly comes in the form of written feedback, and there is limited time …
The value of in-person feedback
While I am commonly considered to be a friendly person, I never had very many friends. This was likely because I was too much. I am was too brown, too bookish, too loud, too assertive, just too much in every single category. It was hard for people to accept me, and I gave up early on in high school to make friends. I fell in where I could, my boyfriends …
Dirt masks and couples massages: My trauma bonds in medical school
Black feminism describes that Black women are inherently valuable and the specific liberation of Black women is necessary in its own right. It parses out these political identities and desires to have true humanity for Black women—arguing that it is impossible for there to be bondage of any other group when we liberate marginalized genders and Black people as these populations are seen as the most marginalized …
The Black feminist revolution medicine needs
Medical school can strip you of everything you have. As you’re doing everything you can to help others, there can be so many levels of dissatisfaction with your career choice and distress around going through medical training.
But what I found was that there was always my loving family to return to whenever something was going particularly poorly. My family was also always there for my successes, which I found to …
5 ways to maintain family bonds in medical school
Parenting is one of those things most of us end up doing but never get any full training on. It’s awkward. Some people are good at it; some people are terrible at it. Sometimes we never know if the parent is simply terrible at parenting, if they have a terrible child, or if there is just a combination of bad factors. However, there are some people who end up being …
Mentors, thank you for parenting me
Mentorship. We all do it; we all benefit from it. But we rarely talk about how the mentor-mentee relationship looks. We rarely talk about ways to improve a mentorship relationship or even have decent mentor-mentee relationships. In fact, many of us likely get into medicine because we want to help patients, but forget how important mentorship often is on our way to learning to achieve such a goal.
Here are 5 …
5 ways to have an outstanding mentorship relationship
Feedback is an integral part of growing as a clinician. We all have room for improvement, and each and every one of us is a work in progress. We all grow by having others observe us and discuss how we are doing with each of us. Giving feedback also becomes an integral part of our medical education and formal training, and it must be something we strive to become good …
6 ways to give quality feedback to medical students
Well before I started medical school, I thought I wanted to be a gynecologist. I remember being absolutely obsessed with reproduction and reproductive health. I remembered learning about periods when I was 9 years old, and I knew I wanted to figure out how to be the doctor that did that work. When I stumbled on Black feminism as a young African American woman in a small college at the …
Victimizing patients as a Black feminist
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