I used to be a stickler for time. One of my first blog posts was about how it felt to go to work without my wristwatch.
I also used to be very particular about knowing the purpose of each visit, partly to help me manage my time, and partly to help me feel prepared and in control of the visit.
I often questioned why my colleagues’ patients would sometimes end up in ...
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Countless times during the course of my day, some person, entity or task vies for my time and attention.
“If I could just have a minute of your time” begins a request to also see the spouse of a scheduled patient, a sales pitch from a pharmaceutical “rep” or home oxygen vendor, a phone call from a visiting nurse, a message from a ...
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A lot of people, many of them medical students, think that rural doctors don’t get to see many interesting cases.
The opposite is true; if you are the only doctor within a wide radius, people will come to you for help, rather than try to pick the appropriate out-of-town specialist to diagnose their problem. In this state with widespread physician shortages most specialists won’t even see self-referred patients.
Sir William Osler wrote: ...
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The year is 2012. A 58-year-old veteran Family Physician who has just finished a day with more human heartaches than clinical triumphs settles down among the pillows with his wife in front of his MacBook to watch a movie, delivered wirelessly over the Internet:
"The year is 1969. A 62-year-old veteran general practitioner who has just seen his health threaten to fail him, speaks passionately to a group of doctors about ...
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I am used to being called a “medical provider” instead of a doctor or a physician these days, but it makes me think about the implications of our choices of words. The word “provider” was first used in non-medical contexts over 500 years ago. It is derived from the Latin providere, which means look ahead, prepare, supply.
“Medical provider” is part of the Newspeak of America’s industrialized medical machine. ...
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“Where there is love of humanity there will be love of the profession.”
-Hippocrates
Reading some of the blog posts and comments on the Internet, you might get the impression that a majority of American doctors hate their jobs. Actually, according Family Practice News, only 35% of my colleagues are unsatisfied with their careers, but that is still a remarkable number.
Are Hippocrates’ words implying an answer to why some doctors today don’t ...
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To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy.
-Hippocrates
Edna Frost is 88 years old, a slender, slow-talking woman with a dry sense of humor and a blood pressure that’s all over the place. At best, she runs ten points higher than any of her previous doctors wanted to put up with. At worst, she flirts with systolics over 200, but that doesn’t seem to be a common occurrence.
Edna has been my ...
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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 ...
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"Doctor Pete" was fifty-one when I started my residency in family medicine. "Family practice" we called it then, and I think I liked that name of our specialty better. It implies continued learning and brings to my mind visions of practicing a down-to-earth craft.
I had interviewed with his predecessor the summer before and was really impressed with him and the program. I ranked it as my first choice in the ...
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New medicines are like new fashions in clothing. They are introduced with great fanfare. Most turn out to seem fairly ordinary after a few years. Some are quickly forgotten or discarded and make us say: “What was I thinking?”
Evaluating a new drug is difficult, for the pharmaceutical and scientific communities as well as for us clinicians. It often takes years of general use before a drug can really prove its ...
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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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Past 6 Months
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