Dear CVS: Please change your hold music

Physician
June 24, 2018

Dear CVS,

Please change your hold music.

Please. Do the right thing.

It’ll take you, or someone who works for you, or even a barely pubescent adolescent who nevertheless knows how to program music on his iPhone with more aplomb than anyone born before 1975, only about 48 seconds.

And 48 seconds is substantially less than the amount of time I have listened to your never-changing hold music.

I have researched the source of this …

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Dear CVS: Please change your hold music

Politics in the exam room? Here’s what this doctor does.

Physician
August 26, 2016

When I was 17 years old, I insisted that my father, a pulmonologist, join Physicians for Social Responsibility. I had just read about the organization in my history class, and I was feeling increasingly hopeless that I would live to see my 30s if the world continued its march toward nuclear Armageddon.

My father refused to even have the discussion.

I’ll get to why he refused in a minute, but first, a bit of …

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Politics in the exam room? Here’s what this doctor does.

To your own Vulcan self: Be true

Physician
March 18, 2015

“What would Spock think about the ‘husky’ designation?” That’s what I was pondering. I was wondering how the master of logic would justify and make sense of the clearly derogatory way I was feeling about myself.

“Fascinating,” I imagined him saying, and he would raise that patented eyebrow.

Then I looked in the mirror, furrowed my brow, took note of the barely present peach fuzz growing under my nose, and with all …

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To your own Vulcan self: Be true