I began my career as a family physician in Buffalo, MN in 2002. I have been an extremely productive doctor for 20 years. For context, I can assure the reader that my ratings and reviews are excellent, and I speak to the common primary care experience. I was a very green attending when I showed up in Buffalo for my first attending job. …
I love metaphors. I think they can be so powerful and can convey so much, sometimes with just a few words.
One metaphor we use in coaching to describe the coach’s role in a session with their client is that of a swimming pool. The client is in the swimming pool, and as the coach we have the job of not jumping in the pool with them.
“Wrong! The most important part of your job is to make money.” I will never forget those words from an attending in residency – though I did not know it at the time, it was a pivotal moment in my decision to pursue a nontraditional route in medicine. I loved my patients; I loved the critical thinking required for taking care of them, I loved the scientific knowledge underlying the …
Political divisiveness has always been part of the fabric of America. Even as our Founders laid the groundwork for the United States, they understood the challenges of seeking to assemble a unified and functional country from such a wide geographic and culturally diverse …
I got married the day after I graduated from medical school to someone I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with. Seven years later, we were divorced.
Even though a high percentage of marriages end in divorce, there is still a stigma that many of us who divorce feel. I had already completed residency and was an attending by the time I got divorced, and I remember feeling so …
Patients often comment on my attire other than my white coat, particularly my impractical footwear, until I finally broke down and purchased Danskos to avoid being called out for my truthful impracticality. It is amazing how patients care more about my orthotics than remembering the reason they scheduled a visit with me, and God bless them for that.
I am in family medicine, and I thrive on personal and genuine relationships where …
We live in a world today where there is misinformation in abundant supply. What we see and hear in the media one day seems to be reversed the following day. What to believe, who to believe? Our world appears to be in a state of turmoil, a state of contradictions. Amid all of this, people are struggling to find some sense of peace and balance in their lives.
Stacks of flyers ranging from local free dinners to legal services collecting in a box or filing cabinet are familiar scenes in student-run clinics (SRCs). To anyone who has worked in social services, maintaining organization and keeping up-to-date resources can be a frustrating and common challenge.
Across the nation, SRCs generally serve homeless, at-risk, and low-income populations for free or at little cost. Primarily run by medical students, SRCs also provide …
I recently read a story that struck close to home for me, and I suspect for nearly all of you in your medical careers at one time or another. It was a story of a surgeon called in urgently to the ED for a seriously injured young boy. The surgeon arrived as soon as he could, only to be confronted by an irate father for being late and accusing the …
I taught myself as a child how to lip read. I needed something to help me know what was going on around me other than relying on my hearing aids. I went to a deaf school as a kindergartner for all of three months and hated it, so my parents switched me over to the local public school system. I was the first deaf student to be mainstreamed in that …
Here’s a controversial phrase for a doctor to say that needs to be normalized: “I am tired.”
As a physician, working oneself to exhaustion for our patients is often seen as a sign of strength and even heroic. As a rare Black male in medicine in the midst of a pandemic that is ravaging patients who look like me, I am especially battle fatigued. In fact, I …
I once attended a business coaching workshop for health care professionals. For one of the exercises, we had to draw our “ideal patient.” The instructor told us to be as specific as we could. We were encouraged to set up a full name profile, age, gender, race, and health challenges. Some of us even wrote two-page background stories about how our ideal patients grew up and who they were dating. …
The corporatization of medicine has destroyed primary care as a specialty. The primary care physician is supposed to be your go-to doctor, your advocate, the coordinator of your health care. Now that corporations buy out hospitals and private practices in an almost predatory fashion, the priority is turning a profit for the corporation at the expense of not only patient health but also the health and well-being of the primary …
Have you ever said this when you are rushing home 1.5 hours after the last patient left and you still haven’t finished all your charting? You grab a handful of forms to take home with you with the hopeful expectation that you will get them done tonight too. After you have done “enough” to appear to be a present parent and prepared supper …
Even if you have a great health insurance plan, you may be faced with large unexpected medical bills that can significantly impact your finances and may lead to medical debt. High deductible plans, the rising cost of care, and high-cost treatments for conditions ranging from cancer to COVID-19 can put almost anyone at risk for medical bills that put strain on their budget. In fact, about a third of adults …
“We have met the enemy in medical education, and he is us!”
My paraphrase of the “philosophy of Pogo” is pertinent to today’s crop of graduating medical students. We have inserted them into the most toxic environment for learning medicine, ever.
Dr. Michael Halberstam once stated that the most powerful treatment the ER had to offer (after CPR, of course) was “the sight of your own doctor at the bedside.” Yet look …
Most of us have iconic people in our personal and professional lives – those who are worthy of veneration and inspire and compel us to have higher expectations for ourselves. And we also have role models – those we aspire to be like …
For the last three years, I have been asking my patients at their annual physical visit the following question: “What are your health goals for the coming year?” I follow up with: “What do you need to achieve them,” or “What would get in the way?” These questions, which seem logical when we stress patient-centered health care, patient empowerment, and …
Health care has been hanging by a thread for some time — in our community and across the nation. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses inherent in an underfunded public health system, a monopolized hospital, and a fractured medical supply chain.
At the beginning of this pandemic, I wrote, “Our lives will not be saved by the government. And lives will not be saved by elected officials or large institutions. Lives will …
The Lebanese-born former American oncologist Farid Fata committed one of the most malicious acts of greed by a medical professional in recorded history.
Fata spent six years telling otherwise healthy people that they had cancer and needed immediate chemotherapy. He then fraudulently billed over $34 million in charges to Medicare and private insurance companies. Fata will arguably spend the rest of his life in prison, but the …
