“Turn out the light, the party’s over,” sang color commentator Dandy Don Meredith on ABC’s Monday Night Football when a seminal fourth quarter play occurred and the game was suddenly in the bag. For me, that’s where it’s at right now — just a few ticks of the clock away
First, for the American Heart Association then for the American Red Cross, …
Looking back on a life teaching CPR
Idioms are expressions everyone understands as something other than what the literal words say. For example, when I talk about “putting all of my eggs in one basket,” everyone knows I’m not really talking about eggs.
We say things like:
It’s raining cats and dogs.
It was a piece of cake!
I heard it straight from the horse’s mouth.
We have a few idioms in medicine, too. If I talk about “hanging crepe” in a …
Idioms and axioms provide a glimpse into medical culture
In the last several shifts I’ve worked in the ED I’ve had more people stop and compliment me on my care. I’ve heard the usual, “Do you have a private practice?” compliment and, “I’ve been here a lot and you really took the time to hear what I was saying, I appreciate that.”
Kudos are nice. They are what makes a tough …
How to improve patient satisfaction in the emergency department
The morning after his brother’s bachelor party, standing on the fourth floor of his family home, Dr. Arvind Goel, felt the ground move under his feet. “First it was minor vibrations and then it built up in a crescendo and then the couch where my four-month-old son was lying began to shake.”
“It was creepy,” Goel, 32, continued. “The furniture began to …
A physician survived the Nepal earthquake. Here’s what he learned.
While there are worse times to sprain an ankle and chip a bone than just one week before a longawaited trip to Venice, I couldn’t think of one as I sat in the emergency room for eight hours last fall.
Venice, the place of canals and not cars; ancient bridges sans escalators. How ironic that just a few days before I was crowing to my husband over my hotel coup. A …
The saga of the boot illustrates the problem of health care costs
Recently I’ve been asked to write about rural surgery, what it’s like, what’s good about it. Everything has its ups and downs.
First of all let me say that whatever your job is, the money you get paid to do that job is for the crappy part, and every job has a crappy part. The trick is to find a job that …
What’s it like to be a rural surgeon? Read this to find out.
Note: This case is meant to illustrate the potential negative effects of inappropriate imaging. It is not intended as a diatribe towards any member of the health care team. Really the only “mistake” made here was the ordering of the CT scan in the first place.
A 37-year-old woman presents to her local emergency department (ED) with a 4-hour history of heartburn …
How heartburn caused a patient to lose her left leg
With my white coat still on, I put my hands together behind my back and heard the police officer ratchet the handcuffs shut. The last place I’d expect this to happen is in the hospital while taking care of patients. But there I was, getting handcuffed along with my attending while standing in the middle of the psychiatry inpatient unit.
Ashley (name …
Breaking the cycle of human trafficking: What can physicians do?
I recently found something I had lost. Or rather, I found someone I had lost. He was a dear friend from my childhood. We spent days and nights roaming the woods near our homes, catching crawdads and minnows in the creek and turning rocks over to look for banded water snakes. We shot bows and arrows and rode bikes. Standard Appalachian stuff, that.
In the winter, we would sled until we …
This doctor transcends the differences he has with others
If I’m to take fashion advice from Maureen Dowd’s March 3 column, “Stroke of Fate,” a take-down of emergency medicine disguised as a recovery narrative of her niece, then I should exchange my white coat for grease-stained overalls.
In her column, a Harvard neurology professor who specializes in stroke describes the brain as the Rolls-Royce of the human body. When it …
Defining the narrative of emergency care: The danger of Maureen Dowd
I just stepped out of the administrative building at medical school and hear a big commotion. I look over and see an elderly male slouched on the ground bleeding profusely from his mouth and nose. Blood is soaking the front of his collared shirt and pooling on the ground. Bystanders are making a scene and not sure what to do.
I drop the items I’m carrying and calmly approach the man and …
Sucker punched and bleeding. Do you know how you’ll respond?
Emergency medicine physicians: Could these be your cases?
Tips to avoid medical errors in the emergency department
“She’s safe,” my friend and fellow resident told me over the phone just hours after reaching his Mom in Kathmandu. A text from my undergraduate Hindi Professor read, “My own family is safe. But it’s hard to comprehend the amount of loss. My own house in which I was born is gone.” Calls, texts, and emails over the last week have been reassuring in the midst of media depictions of …
Keeping Nepal safe moving forward: A doctor’s take
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With the flurry of Twitter posts about Maureen Dowd’s article “Stroke of Fate” in the New York Times, it almost seems as if the subject is already stale.
Maureen Dowd is the Pulitzer Prize-winning op-ed columnist for the New York Times who tells a compelling story about a young patient who suffered from a stroke. The patient was …
An emergency physician defends the profession from the New York Times
“I need a doctor in here!”
As I walk into the resuscitation room in the emergency department (ED), I see Mr. G, a cachectic elderly gentleman barely holding onto his breath. After a rapid assessment, it is clear that he is tiring and cannot maintain breathing on his own for much longer. “We need to secure his airway” — with my command, the resident applies an oxygen mask, cracks open the …
Addressing end-of-life care in the emergency department
As an internist, working in the emergency room feels at times like the dark underbelly of medicine. The frenetic pace, the need to make decisions within highly uncertain conditions, and reliance on technology all cut against the grain of the internists credo of “being a doctor’s doctor.” If internists are biased in how they arrive at diagnoses, emergency medicine doctors face such bias on an exponential scale. Clinical decision-making is …
Confronting cognitive bias in the ER
A recent publication from the Mayo Clinic created a lot of buzz regarding the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or drones, in medicine. However, in reality, most of the drones being used or tested in the U.S. are for things like aerial photography, small package delivery, and surveillance. While several corporations have been quick to expand existing applications …
Drones in medicine: What are the possibilities?
Dear drunk driver,
Tonight, I am tired.
Tired from lack of sleep, tired from the long hours, and tired from bearing witness to your destruction.
Tonight, you caused an accident while under the influence of alcohol. And you are badly injured, requiring emergency surgery. Your liver is hard, cirrhotic, and unforgiving. Although I can get you through this first surgery, I know you will …
Dear drunk driver: From your trauma surgeon
Medicine is plagued by a form of prejudice called “specialism.” (Yes, I just made up that word, but it fits.) In medical school we were united; we were all in the same boat; we were a team making our way through the gauntlet together. And then it came time to choose a specialty.
A satirical article by “Lord Lockwell” circulated on social …
This isn’t Game of Thrones. Physicians need to help each other.
For my entire life as a physician, from medical school, through residency and now until this 22nd year in practice, I have subscribed to the idea that I should have a chaperone when performing breast, pelvic or rectal exams on women. I was taught to do this from the beginning, and I still do it.
Why is this? On some level, the …
We’re going to need more medical chaperones. Here’s why.
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