I was sitting next to a resident in the preceptor room yesterday. He was calling a patient to discuss lab results, and introduced himself on the phone by his first name and last name … but not with “Doctor.” (e.g., “Hi, this is John Smith from the Family Health Center.”)
I occasionally see the residents’ patients for urgent visits. When I ask them who their regular PCP is at the office, …
I had a patient once who wanted an exercise stress test even though he had neither symptoms nor risk factors to suggest the presence of coronary artery disease (such as chest pain with exertion). I argued vociferously against it. However, extenuating circumstances (not relevant here) prompted our mutual decision to go ahead with it anyway. To our surprise and dismay, it came …
Here are the three most useful words for a doctor: “I don’t know.”
A close second would be “I’m not sure,” another three that have got me out of trouble more times than I can remember. The older I get, and more experience I have, the more useful it becomes.
Pattern recognition is essential in effective medical practice. So often patient complaints are vague and nondescript, and in the absence of physical …
I love running.
I typically run 3-4 miles a day 5 to 6 days per week. It’s only about a half hour of time, and it’s well worth it. I get ‘in the zone’ when I run, and I can tune out the rest of the world and enjoy just being. It feels great physically and mentally each time. It’s helped me immensely to stave off the obesity issues that have …
by George H. Northrup, PhD
No one becomes a mental health professional—in my case, a clinical psychologist—for the financial rewards.
With comparable (or less) education, far more lucrative careers exist in law, business, or other health care specialties. Psychotherapy tends to draw practitioners who are fascinated by the mysteries of the mind and who find satisfaction helping others in distress. Money has typically been a …
Private practices are organized in a corporate model where the physicians are shareholders, or where one or more physicians own the practice and employ other physicians or providers. Private practices are almost exclusively for-profit. Physician practices are organized into corporations for the tax benefits as well as protecting the owners from liability judgments.
Hospitals can be for-profit, not-for-profit …
Lying on the backboard, a frail little old lady moaned with discomfort.
She had fallen beside her bed in the nursing home and was then tightly bound by straps onto the backboard, a cervical collar pushing her chin up and holding her immobile. A person not familiar with modern medicine might think the ensemble looked like a torture device. Indeed, it can …
“Code Blue ICU … Code Blue ICU”
I was greeted by the PA system as I walked into the hospital this morning. A shiver ran down my spine as I quickened my pace . The days of running to codes are long gone. But since I have a patient In the ICU I was curious and just a little bit worried.
As I walked through the sliding doors I passed the room …
I was in practice about five years and was about to do a radical nephrectomy on a patient.
I met with the patient and his son in my office and the son informed me that he and his father were Jehovah’s Witnesses and that he didn’t want his father to receive any blood or blood products before, during, or after surgery. I asked the father if that was his wish and he …
If you need laser eye surgery in the state of Kentucky, or a little cosmetic work around the eyelids, it now behooves you to ask your prospective surgeon the following question before signing the operative consent form:
“Say doc, did you go to medical school?”
Kentucky joined the company of Oklahoma earlier this year as the second state to conflate optometrists and ophthalmologists. Only ophthalmologists are the sort of doctors who graduated …
A failed treatment, a surgical complication, a medical error, a patient death. When the going gets tough, even the toughest clinicians should get help.
Physicians and nurses who feel personally responsible for a medical error or a patient’s injury face an immediate quandary—their next patient. In the midst of your angst and guilt, do you suck it up and soldier …
Eric Cropp was a pharmacist who was sent to prison for a mistake that resulted in the death of a child.
This was a high profile case, but it was just one of many examples of a disturbing trend I’ve seen in the U.S. in recent years: a person commits a mistake–with no malicious intent and without being under the …
An excerpt from The Inner Pulse: Unlocking the Secret Code of Sickness and Health.
by Marc Siegel, MD
The Pulse of Recovery
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within.
–Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
The inner pulse can keep beating—loudly—long after doctors, researchers, and their monitors predict …
There are many aspects to being a doctor. Just as important are the many aspects that go into being a patient. Of course, the difference is that one has been perceived as being a position of power and the other one has not. I don’t believe this distinction is useful or true in today’s world.
Patients and doctors work …
An excerpt from This Won’t Hurt A Bit (and other white lies): My Education in Medicine and Motherhood. Copyright © 2011 by Michelle Au. Published by Grand Central Publishing.
Let’s look at this first purely from the perspective of personal investment and expectation. To practice medicine, …
When I advise students about how to choose a specialty, I suggest that they seek out advice from physicians who are at least 10 years out of residency and leading the type of life they hope to have in the future.
It is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to anticipate in your late 20s or early 30s what practicing a certain specialty will be like when you are 40, 50, or 60.
Find …
In my forays into the history of medicine I came across these six little words by Hippocrates.
They seem strangely modern, almost like something you might find on a Hallmark-card for today’s medical school graduates. I don’t know how old the translation is and I couldn’t understand the original text if I tried – but these simple words really touched me when I …
I am infinitely blessed by The Girl Effect. As I look back through the generations of my family, I see it rolling toward me, through me like a wave.
I am sure it started even before my grandmother stole her parents’ car with intent to drive by herself from Austin to Chicago to see the World’s Fair in 1924; I just don’t have much history to work with prior to that. …
American Medical News published an informative essay by Kevin B. O’Reilly on December 13, 2010, about errors in diagnosis and why doctors make them.
According to Gordon Schiff, MD, associate director of the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, “The problem of diagnostic errors has gotten short shrift in the broader patient safety movement.” The article focused on …
The results of the application of reductionism in modern biomedical research and practice has been nothing short of miraculous, but while wondrous for some things, reductionism alone is incomplete.
The basic premise of reductionism is that by breaking down (or “reducing”) complex biological or medical phenomena into their many parts, one is much more likely to understand a single cause and devise a cure.
Historically, the invention of the microscope, the defining …
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