My mom wrote me the following letter during my first semester in medical school. She has been a patient, and a mother/wife/sister/daughter of patients. She has been around countless doctors. Here is her take on what makes a great one.
Dear Son,
I am so very proud that you are becoming a physician and that you chose this profession, not for the prestige or the financial advantages, but because you want to ...
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An excerpt from Pet Goats and Pap Smears.
After two decades of formal education, today I’m finally set loose with real patients. It’the actual moment I’ve been waiting for my entire life.
We’re each assigned to a family doc for the month. I scroll down the list of third-year medical students, place my right index finger beside my name, slide ...
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“Sometimes, how you feel at the end of an interview can be clinically revealing,” my preceptor says. “How does this patient make you feel?”
***
“Mr. M?” I ask gently, knocking on the hospital room door. “May I come in?”
“Hello? Hello?”
I enter at what I think is an invitation to me, but see that 79-year-old Mr. M is speaking into the phone instead.
“I’m sorry, I can come back…” I start to say. ...
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Back in the day, legend has it that when space programs were just developed, NASA soon discovered that ball-point pens will not write in zero-gravity. Unfazed, NASA spent a large amount of money developing pens that will work in space, while the Russians simply used pencils.
It turns out that this legend is only half true, but the lesson remains - sometimes, we get bogged down trying to solve ...
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A friend was working an overnight shift in the ER for one of her mandatory rotations, so I popped in to observe. The ER was surprisingly quiet. A classmate was also observing that night, and like me, he was standing around, bored. We spotted an electrocardiogram (EKG) readout lying on a desk where a resident was working, and we asked him ...
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Today’s medical students will care for tomorrow’s patients, and future physicians need to be prepared to thrive in a rapidly changing health care environment. Future physicians will need to be able to navigate new and increasingly complicated health information technologies, understand and use advances in personalized medicine and many will need to know how to lead accountable care organizations.
Gaps between ...
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“You’re not sorry.”
Within two days two different patients said this to me, each with hatred in his voice. Each time I was alone, each time I had known the patient for only a few minutes, and each time the rage was directed at me and only me.
For seven months, I had avoided being the bad guy. When a patient got upset, he accused my superiors, and I hid behind their ...
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Doctors use different standards to judge scientific research depending on who funded it. They judge research funded by industry as less rigorous, have less confidence in the results, and are less likely to prescribe new drugs than when the funding source is either the NIH or unknown – even when the apparent quality of the research is the same.
Those were the results of a study published by Harvard ...
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Fourth year medical students are starting the interview process to match into a residency program - their next and potentially final stage of training.
Over the next few months, these students will rank the programs they visit based on features such as geography, research funding, and hospital affiliations. But there's another factor to consider - one that gets little attention but that probably matters more for the kind of doctors ...
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Going to a new medical school working its way through the accreditation process is, by design, a bit of an experiment. A school wants to establish itself as distinctive, but in the end, it seems that doing anything radical is out of the question. The drive to conform to professional standards and expectations is a good thing. It generally prevents schools from bilking students of grand amounts of money while ...
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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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