“I don’t know” may be one of the most difficult phrases to both hear and admit. As a patient, fewer words can make you more anxious, and as a health care provider, fewer words can make you feel more powerless. As a whole, the medical community has fostered and embraced a culture of certainty, discouraging the phrase “I don’t know” because of the helplessness it can instill in patients and …
I have the great honor and privilege of coaching medical students throughout their training. In the past week, several students have shared experiences that have stayed with me: On clinical rotations, some shared stories of being referred to only as “student one” or “student two,” their humanity quietly erased. Others described managing food and housing insecurity while carrying the financial burden of medical education. Still others, particularly students with darker …
Medical education has a blind spot.
We spend years teaching students to identify diseases. We drill them on symptoms, pathophysiology, and treatment algorithms. By the time they reach clinical rotations, most can rattle off the differential diagnosis for chest pain or abdominal discomfort without hesitation.
But ask a third-year student how much a CT scan costs, or whether an MRI is worth the added expense over an ultrasound, and you’ll often get …
As a longtime writer and health care educator, I am sometimes approached by media reporters to discuss multiple fields. Despite the breadth of my publications in U.S. and Canadian health care, my original academic degrees (45 years ago) were in engineering subjects. Among my other hobbies, I have at times contributed as a peer reviewer in advanced science and technology journals.
Thus, it came as no surprise when I received the …
We are currently living through the greatest democratization of health information in history. You no longer need a library card or a medical degree to learn about physiology, nutrition, or disease prevention. We carry the world’s medical knowledge in our pockets, accessible with a single tap.
On the surface, this is a victory for public health. People are more aware of the importance of sleep, the risks of processed foods, and …
For the past few weeks, I’ve been rotating through pediatrics. In the emergency room, I met a little boy I’ll call Ian.
Ian was wary of everyone who came close to him, especially anyone holding a stethoscope or thermometer. Sometimes all it took was the way you raised your hand, or a glance toward his neck, for him to retreat behind invisible walls. He was only about a year and a …
I learned medicine in hallways, in the classroom, and outside.
I learned how to apologize to a patient by watching my attending pull up a chair and say, “I should have done better.” I learned how teams actually work by overhearing tense but respectful disagreements during sign-out. I learned what it meant to belong by being given responsibility before I felt ready. None of those lessons happened on Zoom or Teams.
In …
When a correlation between acetaminophen and autism was claimed on the national stage recently, it did more than produce a headline; it signaled a fracture in public trust. Oftentimes dismissed simply as fringe rhetoric, medical misinformation is anything but, having lasting impact on public health outcomes. The same way the U.S. health care system suffers from a paradox between high spending and substandard outcomes, our information ecosystem suffers from high …
“Oh, good, there’s our diversity in the slideshow!” said my supervisor. I was a college student leading a mentorship program for community youth at my predominantly white university, and I was one of two students of color on the leadership team. We were putting together a grant presentation, and in our slide deck there was a slide entitled “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” which addressed in detail the program’s awareness of …
During one of my junior internships, I met a patient whose care challenged not so much my medical knowledge as my understanding of culture. Mr. L., a 20-year-old university student originally from China, presented to the clinic with complaints of low back pain. He firmly believed his back pain was caused by an “improper” posture. During our discussion aimed at clarifying this misconception, I encountered considerable resistance. After speaking with …
Medscape recently released a report entitled, “A Constant Evolution: The Unique Culture of Medical School: Medscape 2025 Report.” The report’s underlying premise is that a warm, welcoming, and supportive culture in medical school allows students to not only “survive” their training, but to truly “thrive” in their educational journey.
What defines medical education today
Yet, reading between the lines, this emphasis on “culture” and environment also poses a very different question: …
I work with many aspiring clinicians from rural communities, and their stories tend to follow the same pattern: deep commitment, strong community roots, and a determination to return home and practice primary care. These are the students who keep rural towns alive.
Lately, many are telling me something I have never heard at this scale: “I don’t think I’ll be able to afford to become a clinician.”
This isn’t about unrealistic expectations. …
“Explain a time you faced vaccine hesitancy and how you handled it.” As a fourth-year medical student applying for pediatric residency, this question came up often in interviews. It is an experience that almost every medical professional has encountered, even early in training. The first story that came to mind was from my newborn nursery rotation during my third year of medical school.
I met a first-time mother who had just …
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Starting my training as an MD/PhD student at Yale, I expected long nights of memorizing biochemical pathways and drug mechanisms. I predicted challenging times learning how to care for patients in tough situations. But what I didn’t expect was just how difficult the current federal landscape would make this journey.
I felt this directly in early 2025. I came to Yale to study the health of LGBTQ+ populations. But when my …
When an attending doctor recently took me aside after a particularly hard clinical case with a first-year resident, she made pains to point out to me that the resident felt she wasn’t being treated fairly by nurses, because she was a woman. The physician went on to describe the difficulty of being a woman in a professional world where male colleagues are taken more seriously and treated with more respect, …
“When people with ADHD are able to get the treatment that they need as soon as they’re diagnosed as children, it gives them the best chance to realize their full potential.” These were the words that hit me like a ton of bricks one day as my preceptor was talking about his experiences treating adult patients with ADHD. I was soaking up every bit of information as he was teaching …
When the first pandemic lockdowns swept through hospitals, our hallways went silent. The absence of visitors felt practical at first, a necessary shield against viral spread. But weeks turned into months, and that silence began to echo with something deeper: distrust.
I remember walking into a patient’s room to find her eyes fixed on the door. She wasn’t waiting for the nurse. She was waiting for her daughter, the daughter she …
When I began PA school, I faced an unexpected financial hurdle: I no longer qualified for employer-sponsored health insurance, and although at the time, I didn’t meet the requirements for Medicaid, I did qualify for subsidized health coverage through the marketplace. However, even with subsidies, the monthly premiums and out-of-pocket costs were still a financial strain. To afford health care and cover basic living expenses, I had to continue working …
The practice of medicine is fundamentally different from the study of medicine. Right now, you’re being rewarded for memorizing and test-taking. But being a good doctor is about communication, clinical judgment under uncertainty, and treating whole humans in context. The skills that get you through preclinical years aren’t the ones that make you excellent at the bedside. Start developing those now: learn to really listen, to tolerate ambiguity, and to …
Patients once traveled on foot from Afghanistan to see my father, a Cleveland Clinic-trained doctor who practiced in Peshawar, Pakistan. It is easy to attribute such health care to a developing country. But California’s economy outperforms whole nations, and patients in the Central Valley still drive for hours to get life-saving treatment. I have lived and studied in both of these “doctor deserts,” one arid and one fertile. Both are …
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