When I was in television, I was friends with the late Gene Siskel (the film critic’s syndicated show would shoot in our Chicago CBS studio). Siskel would drop by my office to talk and get free medical advice.
Siskel was, you might say, frugal. I remember when I was in contract negotiations with CBS, my bosses couldn’t praise me enough — but the money wasn’t there. When I told Siskel about …
Advice for PCPs from Gene Siskel
The young woman in my clinic, whom I’ll call Nicole, was 8 months pregnant with her third child. It should have been a joyous time — but she was in a county jail. Nicole was awaiting trial for a misdemeanor, and while a judge had set bail, she couldn’t afford to pay it.
I’m a public health researcher and physician in the Los Angeles County Jails, the largest jail system in …
Bail reform matters. A physician explains why.
Sixty is the number of patients left on our schedules at the end of the day on Monday this week, people who never showed up, what we call no-show appointments. This number does not include those patients who did reach our practice to reschedule (these are counted separately), but simply those who never made it in for their scheduled appointments.
While we are a very busy practice, and this is not …
No shows at your practice. And how to fix it.
Burned out cardiac surgeon seeks opportunities or empathy,” one message reads. “I feel stuck,” another confides. A third says simply, “I don’t want to be a doctor anymore!”
The posts come in from across the globe, each generating its own thread of commiseration and advice. “I just wanted to reach out and let you know I feel your pain,” a doctor-turned-MBA replies to one surgeon. “Your story is so similar to …
Here’s the place where burned out physicians go
Monday morning and no place to go. After 35 years of practicing medicine and GI, including a year of eager anticipation, the day had arrived when there were no patients in my schedule. Nor would there be tomorrow. Nor the next day.
I was happily accustomed to a scheduled life. For me it had been decades of awakening early, working out, assembling a breakfast to inhale in the car, kissing the …
A retired physician asks: Am I still a doctor?
Being the intern on the team, I knew the scut work belonged to me. Every medical student understands the hierarchy of the medical team, and there was just no way around that. If a patient needed urgent blood work drawn at 3 a.m., call the scut monkey as we were called. Any patient requiring a rectal exam required an intern to perform the test. Scut basically was any work that no …
It is easy to pass judgment and much harder to pass empathy
Truthfully, I am not from a military family. Naturally, my grandfathers were in the service, but they didn’t die serving. Also, my birthday has always fallen on Memorial Day weekend, or near it. So rather than visiting a cemetery, we usually have a small party. For some reason, perhaps it’s the political divisiveness in my beloved country, I have been thinking more and more about Memorial Day.
To my understanding, Memorial …
Memorial Day thoughts from a physician
Last fall I was witness to a miraculous event. I rarely take off from work, but did so on a Friday to go to Baltimore to lend moral support to my family doctor friend, Cathy Maslen. She and her workmates at Chase Brexton Health Care (a community health clinic in the Baltimore area with a focus on the gay and transgender community and the inner-city poor) were doing something that …
To help patients, doctors should consider going on strike
I have a confession to make. I don’t understand the concept of burnout. I mean, I get the idea. Medicine is, at least when you are the kind of doctor who deals with life and death, inherently stressful. And I feel the stress. It’s as if someone applied a vice grip to my insides in the middle of medical school, and it has never let up since. The pressure is …
You want doctors to be doctors again? Get out of the way.
My cousin visited me in sunny Cali this past weekend. She lives a life that many in the medical community can appreciate: a stable and successful job for many years, but burnt out. She then decided to take six months to work on her writing and try establishing herself through various pursuits. While successful in some ways, she decided she needed a more stable position. So she found a job, …
4 ways to take a break from your career
Telemedicine is the new rage in medicine and a very needed service. It is vital in areas that are underserved and doctors hard to come by. Additionally, it can be a great convenience for patients who may not actually need to physically go to the doctor. But, is telemedicine dumbing down the standard of care?
Doctors are held to a certain standard in the way they treat patients. If they fail that …
Is telemedicine dumbing down the standard of care?
“This latte is too sweet,” I think to myself as the foamy hotness lights up the sweet receptors on my tongue. I stop and try to remember how many pumps the nice lady at the coffee shop slammed into my cup and think it’s somewhere around three or four — will have to go down to one tomorrow. I sigh and spin in my office chair breathing deeply and looking …
What emotions are doctors allowed to feel?
The middle-aged man in my exam room wasn’t an alcoholic. At least, that’s what he declared to me as I asked him questions about his drinking.
“I’m not like those people,” he said, smiling nervously. “I go to work. I don’t fall down the stairs. I don’t embarrass myself.”
As we spoke further about the consequences of drinking six to seven beers every night (and a few shots here and there), …
We do not take unhealthy alcohol use as seriously as we should
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If you are a physician reading this, please pat yourself on the back. You made it through medical school and residency so, de facto, you have both resiliency and grit (serious buzzwords, y’all). But as anyone who has gone through these professional challenges, it often doesn’t seem so.
I am 44 years old and am faculty at a major public university and cis-gendered, heterosexual, married, two kids and have a full-time …
7 ways to not feel like an imposter
Recently, the Harvard Chan School of Public Health reported on the effect of surgical checklists in South Carolina. The press release was titled, “South Carolina hospitals see major drop in post-surgical deaths with nation’s first proven statewide Surgical Safety Checklist Program.”
The Health News Review, for which I review, grades coverage of research in the media. Based on their objective criteria, the Harvard press release would not score highly.
The title exudes …
When science ceases to be value-neutral, science ceases to be science
When my children were growing up, I advised them, “Don’t choose any profession in which your worth is determined by knowing a body of information or using algorithmic thinking. If you do that, you’re toast.”
”Toast” because monopolies on information have been supplanted by the internet, and algorithmic thinking replaced by computers and artificial intelligence. Incredibly, this seismic shift in what society values has occurred in just a single generation.
And that’s …
Physicians are low-hanging fruit. Here’s why.
I stood in line behind a physician, slightly balding and in a long, starched lab coat at the coffee shop in our hospital. As he paid and took his coffee, I noticed that he smiled and called the clerk by name, “Thank you, Terri.” He went on about his day, and I was left to wonder about the man, his practice and what type of person he was.
My friend has …
5 ways to tell if a practice has integrity
Mindfulness has gained a lot of awareness and attention over the last few years as the medical community has set out to find strategies for prevention of physicians burnout. What has been coined “mindfulness-based stress reduction” or “mindfulness” is a principle proven long before medical researchers decided to reduce it to treatment strategy to promote acceptance among the physician community. This very useful tool today is becoming widely used in …
Mindfulness is the key to physician burnout
The cadaver lab is a rite of passage in medical school — those few months early on when we dissect a human body to better understand our anatomy. It’s grotesque: peeling back skin, separating muscle sinews, and sawing through bone.
It’s so emotionally jarring that young doctors in training often compartmentalize the experience, and this person before us …
Losing that patient was one of my most traumatic experiences
Two sisters (religious order, not biological relation, as far as I know) live in one of the condos across from us. They are very nice, older ladies, warm and pleasant, always ready with a kind word and a smile as they see others in the complex come and go. They seem, at least on casual observation, to lead very busy lives. They rise early, heading out to do whatever it …
What do physical gait, movement, and apparent drive tell us about each other?
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