As physicians-in-training, medical students suppress feelings and mask them under the veil of professionalism. Sometimes however, medical training requires us to manufacture emotions. During the third year of medical school, the majority of student grades are derived from the subjective evaluations of the residents and attendings that work with us. To achieve the highest marks, students must appear to be “engaged” and “excited” at all times. While most of us …
Perhaps one of our greatest assets and strongest detriments in medicine is our ability to look at a patient and make a quick, thorough assessment of his or her condition and state of distress. Certainly, a good clinician is able to triage and provide greater quality of care in the emergency room if he or she can use the intangibles of a patient’s presentation to provide them better quality of …
Like any other industry, in health care, the books and schooling don’t always match the “real world.” Patients everywhere have the same complaints about physicians and their bedside manner. “I feel like she’s talking at me, not to me.” “He said I had cancer like it was just another sentence.” “He walked in, looked at my meds, and walked right out of the room without saying a word.”
I stood right beside them as they slowly slid your head into a plastic bag, looped the coarse twine about your neck and tied it tightly. Like the amateurs they were, they double-knotted it to make sure nothing came loose or dripped out. Then they casually walked away, chatting about what would come next.
Within minutes the bag fogged up, and a clear red liquid pooled at the bottom.
I know where America’s future primary care physicians are, and more importantly, where we are losing them. I am one of them, and I almost got lost.
Maybe I was naïve. I’d had no math or science classes as an undergraduate, and I’d never really thought about the mechanics of medical education. Even while jumping through all the prerequisite hoops before applying, it never occurred to me how inadequate my non-traditional …
I asked why physicians were dying by suicide. Here’s what they told me:
“I definitely graduated from med school with PTSD. It has changed me forever. My mom’s friend that I have known since I was born saw me for the first time since I went to med school and she [told my mom], “She has changed so much. Was it worth …
From an early age, I was encouraged by my family to consider a career in medicine. I was told it was a well-respected profession, offering financial security and community respect. Seeing the white coats, stethoscopes, and grateful patients at my childhood doctors’ visits made the field mysterious and intriguing, and these stuck with me as I grew older. I also developed a love for music at an early age; I …
In a piece that’s gone viral, internist Daniela Drake writes a strongly-worded column in the Daily Beast about how miserable it is to be a physician:
To be sure many people with good intentions are working toward solving the healthcare crisis. But the answers they’ve come up with are driving up costs and …
In my transition from pure learner (i.e., the med student role) to teacher-learner (i.e., the attending), I’ve actually found myself focusing more on the learner than the teacher part of my dual existence. Strong learning seems to be requisite to strong teaching, and I am realizing that succeeding on the next level requires some extra meta-cognition, that is, learning to learn in new ways.
With the rollout of Obamacare, we are living in a moment in which there is no dearth of heated debates among friends, family, and co-workers.
And often times, these debates degrade to become emotion vs. emotion, or even ad hominem, and so these initially well-meaning conversations morph into heated arguments that lead nowhere. (Even Immanuel Kant advised debaters to out-shout opponents when more civil methods of discourse had failed.)
“What did you do?” my aunt wondered, amazed that her hyperactive 12-year-old had been transfixed for nearly an hour. “Were you two playing video games?”
“Actually we were just talking about some of the things I learned in medical school. He’s really interested,” I told her. Indeed, he hadn’t even touched one of the delicious samosas we were eating. Every time he …
What do you do when your ideal residency program does not exist? This is a truth that all perspective applicants must come to terms with, but I was still hoping that I would be the exception. I had created my list of everything my top family medicine program must have, including strong research mentorship, dedicated faculty, and a welcoming resident environment, and I had an idea going into the interview season what …
Should medical school be shortened to three years?
I say, “no.”
Here’s why.
There is way too much to learn in 3 years. Unless medical education is radically changed, it will be impossible for students to memorize all the unnecessary stuff they still have to memorize, complete all their clerkships, and move onto the next phase — residency training.
I do not see how medical students can choose a career path before they have …
As a medical student, I am being taught not to judge patients. If a patient tells me that he has smoked cigarettes for forty years of his life despite the protests of his wife, I am supposed to nod my head understandingly without showing my inherent disapproval. If a patient tells me that she has given her husband genital herpes because she is cheating on him, I am not supposed …
As a medical student looking to explore entrepreneurship, I quickly came across Shiv Gaglani’s October 2013 article in Entrepreneur, entitled “Why Medical Schools are Pumping Out Entrepreneurs,” in which he the highlights similarities and differences he sees between medical students and entrepreneurs. I was struck by his proposed differences — he does not share his take on their origins, so I have come to delineate my own view.
Match Day: It’s among the most memorable moments of medical school, a time when students, friends, family and faculty gather to open those coveted white envelopes. It’s the symbolic first step out of medical school and into residency, and a tradition that is beloved by many. Yet the matching process is viewed by those outside of the medical profession (and to some within it) as a very odd way to …
Poverty is a significant public health concern affecting 10-15% of individuals living in Canada and the United States. Recommendations to eliminate poverty have focused on areas of income, housing, food security, and early childhood development. Calls for government action and provision of resources to healthcare professionals have been issued. Notably, educating medical trainees to address poverty has been absent from the discussion.
Since becoming a full-time medical school faculty member again, I’ve volunteered to interview about two applicants each month from September through March. When I first started doing this, I was surprised that the admissions office did not provide me with a copy of the applicant’s resume and essay until the time of the interview, carried in a manila folder by the applicant.
But I quickly realized that it wasn’t necessary to …
I still remember when my phone rang with an eerie sound, early in December 2013. The oncologist I had seen a couple of days earlier was on the other end asking me to return to the hospital ASAP because my bone marrow biopsy results was consistent with acute leukemia and I was at risk of bleeding.
That was the first time I knew about my diagnosis while he merely broke the …
As a philosophical coda to the 2013 cacophony over Obamacare, health care reform and the notion that doctors and their skills will be needed less in some indeterminate future, this last month saw a media frenzy about the fate of the doctor’s white coat.
It started with an article by Gonzalo Bearman and his colleagues in Infection Control and Epidemiology that asked the …
