An excerpt from Suicide Med.
“I wish I had become a ballet dancer instead.”
I use the back of my forearm to swipe at strands of dark hair that have come loose from the tight bun at the back of my head. The attempt fails and the escaped locks fall back …
Suicide Med: A medical school thriller
I recently read an interesting article in Glamour about why Zosia Mamet, an actress on HBO’s Girls, refuses to “lean in.” While the column focuses on the influence of modern-day feminism on notions of professional success, her words resonated with me as a medical student and an aspiring psychiatrist.
“I have been incredibly blessed with success in my chosen career. I’ve worked my a** off and had the support and encouragement …
Can medical students lean in to psychiatry?
Since joining my current practice two years ago, I’ve noticed that I care for a disproportionate number of immigrants of Chinese and other Asian descent compared to my colleagues. Although both of my parents were born in Taiwan, I don’t speak Mandarin or have special expertise on medical conditions common in Asian Americans. Nonetheless, Asian patients seem more comfortable with me anyway. Similarly, U.S. health workforce analyses show that underrepresented …
America’s need for a diverse generation of family physicians
I recently read some statistics that shocked me, but not really. In the U.S., 60% of medical students come from families with incomes in the top 20% of the nation. Meanwhile, only 3% come from families with incomes in the lowest 20%. Not much socioeconomic diversity in the house of medicine.
Now, I realized early on that I didn’t have a lot of company in this respect, but I didn’t think …
The lack of socioeconomic diversity in medicine
Dear Jane:
Thank you for asking me about my perspectives on medical school. Here are some general principles that you might find useful in your own training:
1. View everyone as your teacher. Everyone you encounter will teach you something. Be open to what they have to offer.
Yes, your professors and attendings, the “official” teachers, will educate you. Patients, however, will often be your best teachers. Listen to what they say, watch how …
6 guiding principles as you enter medical school
My path to medicine is tied to my family’s experience with poverty, and with the profound economic fallout a major illness can bring in such circumstances. I grew up on the Couer d’Alene reservation in Northern Idaho. My mother was a single parent who had to rely on government assistance to raise three children in subsidized housing. As the eldest, I was expected to help care for my younger siblings …
Medicine is an inaccessible career choice for Native Americans
When I started medical school, a wise professor likened the amount of new information I was about to learn to trying to drink water from a fire hose. It didn’t take long until I understood exactly what he meant. After sitting through the seemingly endless hours of lecture, lab and small group sessions required in the first two years of medical school, my head was spinning from information overload. The …
Are we training medical students to be high-quality health care providers?
My business ethics class recently discussed the case of Cipla Pharmaceuticals, an Indian generic drug manufacturer drawing the ire of big pharma by blithely ignoring international patents or employing workarounds to manufacture low-cost generics in direct violation of the patents. Cipla’s founder, Dr. Yusuf Hamied, stressed that Cipla’s goal wasn’t to steal from the bottom line of the likes of Merck and Eli Lilly, but rather to serve its mission …
The divergent languages of business and medicine
Recently, I was on call for surgery at a hospital in New York City. At 2 a.m. in the morning, we were paged to a trauma in the ED. After we stabilized the patient and moved him for CT scans and x-rays, I noticed a small stretcher tucked away in the back part of the ED, a place typically reserved for overflow patients when we run out of rooms.
The patient …
A medical student speaks up and saves a life
Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.
– Jill Lepore, author of The Disruption Machine: What the Theory of Innovation Gets Wrong
“What do you want me to do with all the stuff in this box?” my wife asked this weekend.
I looked inside and saw my former self: one of BNC and pin connectors, wires, a notebook with sin, cos, theta, and a host of other equations — a …
What kind of doctor are we breeding in medicine now?
There is a tremendous amount of handwringing among students, workforce researchers, and medical school deans about the record amount of debt that medical students incur — more than $175,000, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. This has unintended consequences, including student selection of more lucrative specialties and placing medical education beyond the reach of low-income and minority students. The average …
5 sensible ways to decrease medical school debt
Earlier this year, I started teaching a course to first year pediatric residents at Stanford. In it, I challenge the trainees to identify the structural contexts in which patients and families make choices that may impact their health and well-being. Termed structural competency, the goal is to enable young physicians to understand and confront stigma and inequality as key determinants of health. We …
Inequality in medicine: Be thoughtful about the way we educate our trainees
In his commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College, international affairs journalist and author Fareed Zakaria defended the value of a liberal arts education. “At its essence,” explained Zakaria, “a liberal education is an education to free the mind from dogma, from controls, from constraints. It is an exercise in freedom.” His speech, I imagine, was well received and much appreciated by the over 400 graduates earning liberal arts degrees that day …
Why premedical students need the liberal arts
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An intriguing article was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — one of the most prestigious (more on “prestige” later) journals around — with the provocative title, “Rescuing U.S. Biomedical Research from Its Systemic Flaws.” That this was written by some of our country’s most well-respected scientists provides credibility to this challenging and thought-provoking critique. The …
Applying translational research to real world scenarios
As I walked home last night I glanced up at the evening sky of Dominica. Twinkling down at me was what seemed like a surprisingly bright star compared to all the rest. It couldn’t be a plane because planes very rarely fly over this Caribbean island. It seemed to be stationary so it couldn’t be a meteor. Confused, I pulled out the sky map on my iPhone and discovered it was …
Rekindling a medical student’s passion for medicine
We recently took our last exam as first-year medical students. Sitting in the same library that I used to as a pre-medical student, I thought about what it was, exactly, that changed this year. For me, the point of transition from pre-med to med student really happened over last Thanksgiving break.
I had come home from my first term of medical school more …
A 4-year-old taught me the most important lesson in medical school
I was on the cusp of my first year in medical school, and time was running out. Classes started in two weeks. I needed a place to live: Ideally someplace cheap, not too far from school.
There was an opening at Phi Chi medical fraternity, a large brick house of faded elegance located less than a block from my classes at the University of Minnesota. At $75 a month for a …
The night when I entered the cult of medicine
I recently read an article entitled, “Are you a victim of patient profiling?” and it got me thinking about my medical school career thus far, particularly my recent preparations for USMLE step 1.
Patient profiling is part of medical school curriculum. Many of the practice questions that I’ve done for Step 1 have relied on patient profiling (a euphemism for prejudice I believe) to get the correct answer. If the question starts …
Patient profiling is part of the medical school curriculum
I read an article in the Boston Globe about how doctors are flocking to get Master of Business Administration (MBA) degrees in record numbers. The prestigious program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, apparently now has more students from the health care sector than any other field — accounting for almost 20 percent of the class.
A large number of these …
We need fewer doctor MBAs and more doctor healers
This quarter of medical school has by far been my favorite, because almost everything we do has an explicit clinical correlation. Each week we work in small groups of 10 or so students to go over patient cases, practice respiratory and cardiovascular (our two organ blocks this quarter) physical exam skills, and interface with real patients in the hospital. These experiences have been both exciting and humbling, and two in …
A passion for family-centered care
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