An excerpt from Born to Be Wild: Why Teens Take Risks, and How We Can Help Keep Them Safe.
According to the National Sleep Foundation’s Sleep in America Poll of 2014, 75 percent …
A cautionary tale of the dangers of a delayed sleep phase in adolescents
Inquisitive reader Amy asked me if I had any opinions about online screening for depression. The British Medical Journal recently published a debate on this issue.
What an excellent question, Amy! I read the opposing arguments, and these are my thoughts:
First, I see two different issues. The first is whether the 9-question Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) is an appropriate tool to use to screen for depression. The second is …
Online screening for depression: Here’s what one physician thinks about it
Saturday nights on my couch are usually late and peaceful. But my old friend, civil unrest, crept into my reprieve. Do I do one more “to-do task?” Or do I or continue my aimless net surfing? But it’s not exactly aimless now. I’d just stumbled across an online article: “When You are the Friend of a Physician Suicide.”
The physician-author’s narrative about his friend’s death and the reader’s posts, mostly from …
How a suicide taught this doctor a lesson
“The doctors who did this should be hanged.”
It’s a statement the came at me with a bang. It stood out in its thread, in the accusatory way of old courtroom scenes of black and white movies, where the heroine dramatically screams out at the jury, seated wide-eyed in their box nearby.
But it was merely a response to a Facebook post on the topic of the opioid epidemic, typed in nonchalantly, …
Doctors are taking the blame for the opioid epidemic. It’s time to push back.
It’s 8:45 p.m. in rural Chiapas, Mexico. A cool blanket wraps around the previously warm day in the small farming town of Honduras. With a syringe of medicine in his front pocket pasante, Dr. Ivan Martinez does a steady jog up a steep hill to see about a patient’s chronic pain.
Nestled in the Sierra Madre Mountains, there are few flat places. At the door, he’s immediately and warmly greeted by multiple …
What it’s like to follow a first-year physician in Mexico
My intern gazed blankly at her notes from the day.
“You OK?” I asked.
Her face was quivering with restrained tears as she turned to me, “I don’t think I helped anyone today.” This was not the first time, nor would it be the last time, that I had heard those words from a resident physician.
Medical training is no joy ride. How could it be? First, there is the intellectual challenge of …
How to find joy in practicing medicine
I was inspired a couple of weeks ago. Sitting at the WeWork facility in Northern Liberties, Philadelphia. I looked at the group of entrepreneurs, creatives and innovative thinkers sitting in front of me. What were we doing you might ask? Collaborating to help one another build our dreams. This is the epitome of the human experience.
One of the topics that came up in conversation was the difference between a man …
Are doctors more like humans, animals or robots?
“You’re a doctor; focus on being a doctor.”
This piece of advice was recently given to me by my own father, in regards to my multiple ambitions outside of the medical field. He himself only recently retired from a long career as a surgeon, so his opinion is the result of years of experience.
His advice got me thinking.
What makes for career longevity in our field? Statistics show that more than half …
For a long, happy career, be more than just a doctor
On our first night in Dublin, my mother and I head straight to a pub. We sit at a table across the room from a cheerful woman who looks to be in her eighties. It doesn’t take her long to walk across the room and join us. She grasps her pint of beer and takes a long gulp. We learn that her name is Mary and she welcomes us with …
A way to stop social isolation? Beer.
Doctors see firsthand the toll that today’s increasingly stressful society takes on patients: Engineers, office managers, teachers, you name it.
Work demands have increased, as has multitasking. Pressures outside the workplace add additional stress. Often, parents chauffeuring children to multiple activities must also care for aging parents with increasing needs. Electronic devices, always in hand or close by, command our attention (due to work or personal needs, sometimes simultaneously). Finding a …
Physician, heal thyself. With help.
My first year after completing surgical residency was an exhilarating and exhausting experience that most physicians will recall as part of their training. The American medical culture has imagined that the nation’s doctors — no matter their workload — simply don’t reach physical or emotional exhaustion in their work. But they do, and as we debate the future of healthcare in our country, we need to address this problem and quickly get to solutions, …
The hidden crisis within the health care crisis
We have believed a lie to prop up an increasingly untenable system. We have behaved as if we could safely put our emotions aside to do our jobs at no substantial cost to ourselves in the process. We’ve all heard the admonishments.
“I don’t want my surgeon crying in the operating room. He needs to leave those emotions outside.”
Or: “This is just the way medicine is now. It has nothing to …
The deception at the heart of physician burnout #SustainableDocs
In days of yore, people in distress usually turned to family, friends and occasionally the clergy for help but for many years now, much of the burden of dealing with human misery has been transferred to medical professionals. Going forward and given that the iPhone and social media are ubiquitous in the daily lives of most of us, it is probably no surprise that the latest psychological support system comes …
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Words matter. At some point, we all may have casually tossed a psychiatric adjective to describe a situation or person. There is usually no malicious intent behind the use of these colloquialisms. However, during these strange and unprecedented political times, psychiatric terms seem to be thrown around more so by those trying to paint a picture of current prominent figures. A late-night show host referred to someone as “being off …
“That’s crazy”: Stop using psychiatric words as insults
It was an ordinary day in clinic — I had gotten very behind schedule when a 90-year-old gentleman, who was in for his third visit in a month related to falls, came in with his equally frail wife. We had to spend extra time discussing his placement in a nursing home for safety concerns.
I hastily entered the room of a 46-year-old attractive female, who was here to meet me as …
White nationalists and neo-Nazis marched through Charlottesville, President Trump addressed the nation in what should have been a straightforward call for unity against racism and bigotry. Instead, he left us perplexed, wondering if he had just insinuated anti-racist counter-demonstrators were to blame for the violence that ensued. Trump then made explicit his intentions by attempting to spin an argument of moral equivalence between white supremacists and racial justice advocates. He …
After Charlottesville: What are physicians responsible for?
At the beginning of this year, I bought a ukulele. I started intern year at a sprint, like anyone does, arms full of hope which was quickly extinguished, lost in an atmosphere so devoid of hope that all of it flew out of my arms to settle into places so far in between it might as well have been floating in the vacuum of space.
The cloak of physicianship burdens upon …
A ukulele helped this physician get through intern year. Here’s how.
The National Academy of Medicine has launched an Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience, but there is one missing stakeholder. On July 14th, NAM hosted its first public meeting on establishing clinician well-being as a national priority. The inaugural sponsors include nearly many medical specialty societies, the major insurance companies, the American Associations for hospitals, nurses, physicians and medical colleges, Johns Hopkins, Mass General and …
Can health care executives help with physician burnout?
A colleague said earlier this week, as he bravely disclosed his journey with anxiety and depression that he had “become excellent at hiding [his] depression, especially as an extrovert.”
My colleague brings others along into a wake of happiness he trails but is also able to sit knee-to-knee with the parents of dying patients and empathize in their suffering — to truly let a small part of their pain sit and …
A physician doesn’t hide his depression
Good pain physicians are dying. Recently, Dr. Todd Graham was shot dead in a parking lot over refusing to prescribe opioids to a man’s wife. Physicians who care deeply and try to do the right thing are being murdered for not prescribing opioids.
I prescribe very few opioids in my chronic pain practice. I do so in a judicious and safe manner for my patients. I have excellent training, and I …
Physicians are being murdered for not prescribing opioids
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