I’ll start with this: it’s great to be back.
I’ve been on hiatus from blogging for the past few months because of the exam I took last week: the medical boards, or Step 1, an eight hour test that covers all of the first two years of medical school to prepare us for the hospital wards. To give you an idea of what it entails, most second-year medical students use a ...
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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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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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In 1977, a group of doctors began a campaign to change the name of an inflammatory arthritis after discovering it was named after a Nazi doctor who planned and performed gruesome forced human experimentation that killed thousands. In one of these experiments, for example, Hans Conrad Julius Reiter inoculated Buchenwald concentration camp inmates with the microbe causing typhus, resulting in the deaths of over 250 people. The inflammatory arthritis ...
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There’s an intersection in Boston outside one of my favorite places to eat. At the corner of two bustling streets is a white bike, chained in place, surrounded by flowers. In loving memory.
***
One evening earlier this month, I was riding the ‘T,’ Boston’s streetcar system, when our train suddenly stopped.
There were the usual sights and sounds of delayed passengers: people fiddled with cell phones, glanced at watches, tapped feet impatiently. ...
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I never thought I would call cancer "cool."
It was the last day of anatomy lab. Finally, we had dissected through everything: starting with the back, moving through arms and legs, hands and feet, chest cavity with lungs and heart, abdominal cavity with gastrointestinal organs, pelvis, and ending with head and neck.
Looking at our cadaver was disorienting. There were insides where outsides should be. Organs completely removed. The head literally sawed ...
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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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