Inhalation. Exhalation. Perspiration. Equivocation. Self-Abnegation. Devastation. Urination.
The list of things I’ve endured in the name of getting to medical school could go on, and I doubt it’s any different from my classmates’. But we’re here, finally, freshly white-coated and already racing just to stay on track.
The White Coat Ceremony was a timely, though sometimes tearful reminder of what we did to get here, why we did it, and what we’re ...
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I’ve written about this before, but some recent encounters with medical students have me thinking about it again. I went off to medical school thirty-eight years ago. For the era, I went to what folks regarded as a very progressive place. It had a curriculum that was quite revolutionary for the time. Among other things, we started having interactions with actual patients during our first year, rather than the third ...
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Last week, I tried something new with our residents. We tried to talk about why physicians overuse tests. This is the topic of the moment, as the American College of Physicians (ACP) just dropped their long-awaited new High Value Cost Conscious Curriculum for what has now been dubbed the “7th competency” for physicians-in-training.
In addition to the ACP curriculum, which I served as one of the reviewers for, I ...
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When I was a surgical residency program director, I often wondered what the establishment, you know those guys who ran surgical education, was thinking. Some may remember the rule that a resident had to see at least 50% of the patients he operated on in the clinic or the private surgeon’s office in order to claim credit for having done the case.
There was the emphasis that still exists today on ...
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One evening during my first year of medical school, I was waiting by the entrance to The Salvation Army to let another student back into the free clinic. The weekly clinic was organized by MEDiC, an organization of student-run free clinics in the Madison area. A family with four small children was returning to spend the night at the shelter, and one of the kids saw the stethoscope around my ...
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"Dr. Fisher, can you teach our residents EKG lecture series?"
Naively, I said "Sure!"
What I didn't realize is how hard this is to do today.
Much of this is not residents' fault. They only have so many hours in so many days to attend lectures while caring for patients. Thanks to residency work-hour restrictions, those hours have become even fewer. To make matters much worse, through the year residents are torn to ...
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“I swear to God, if you come any closer, I will kill you,” said the 30-something year old, arms as wide as bazookas, eyes as piercing as the very needles I was about to stick him with. He was hooked up to IVs on every limb, had tubes coming out of his nose and going down his throat, but other than that, he was about as physically fit as anyone I’d ...
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There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
- Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark
Over the past year I have been blogging for The Lancet Student. As luck would have it, I ended up writing during my 3rd year of medical school, American Style. This is my “clinical clerkship” year. In a way, my posts have been a record of my journey during that year.
As ...
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Whether you’re starting medical school or beginning your second year, this post is for you. Will probably work just as well for PAs, NPs and any other health professional student who hasn’t started clinical rotations.
Our former babysitter just graduated from medical school and the WhiteCoats are just as proud as her parents are. Then I started thinking, what advice would I give to students starting medical school?
Our first day of ...
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Years ago, I spotted an acquaintance I hadn't seen in a while. The conversation was odd. A few times, I would ask a question and he would begin to respond, only to trail off into silence and stare blankly into space. He would remain frozen until the moment I said something else, whereupon he would act normally. He seemed completely oblivious to the fact that he had trailed off and ...
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"A comprehensive and extremely useful roadmap for doctors."
-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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