You get a terrible headache. What do you do next? Take ibuprofen and try to sleep it off? Call your primary care physician (PCP) for an appointment? Dial 911 for an ambulance to take you to the emergency department (ED)? What if that headache comes with a cough and shaking chills?
Would an ad influence your decision?
I came across this image ...
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I was sitting in the resident workroom at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) when my co-resident showed me the text from her sister: two explosions had shaken the finish line of the Boston marathon. Though news sites had not yet published the headline, it was immediately corroborated by the cacophonic wails of ambulances heading towards us and our shock was quickly replaced by the urge to learn more and to do ...
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When I attended the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) conference in Boston recently, discussion swirled on the topics of unsustainable costs of care, doctors’ incentives under traditional payment models to order more tests and treatments, and the struggles of patients’ family members to avoid unwanted care at the end of life. That Sunday night, I was back at my day job (so to speak) in ...
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I just took step three of the national board exams - the final in a series that all U.S. physicians must pass to practice medicine unsupervised. The two day exam, composed of multiple choice questions and simulated patient cases requiring free-text answers, brought up subjects that we haven't thought about since medical school (Sick children? Terrifying.) The test also shed some light into how doctors think under ...
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When a patient dies in the hospital, we go through a checklist that has become eerily mundane. Examine the patient to confirm the death. Notify the family, the senior doctor, the local organ bank, the admitting office, and (in some cases) the medical examiner. Fill out the report of death. Write a death note. Brace yourself against the emotional weight of the event and get on with your work. Nowhere ...
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I knew he was sick when he told me he'd thrown out his cigarettes on account of how badly he felt.
Mr. P had gotten used to the breathlessness when he climbed stairs and the hacking, dry cough that followed him everywhere. What else could he expect after smoking three packs a day since he was six years old? But he had shown ...
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Between 7:30 and 10 a.m. on a glacial late November morning, a tall white van lingers at a street corner in Boston's South End. I consult my iPhone one more time to confirm that I'm in the right place and knock on the vehicle's glass-paned door. Ritchie, with his oversized Las Vegas baseball cap and faint smell of cigarettes, ushers me inside and I settle in across from him on ...
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Protected naptime is a luxury usually reserved for the under-five-year-old set. Might it also be a tool to combat our country's astoundingly high rates of medical errors?
Trainee fatigue has been a major focus of patient safety efforts since the mid 1980's, after 18-year-old Libby Zion died tragically from a drug interaction that may have been precipitated by residents working long hours. In 2003, the Accreditation Council for Graduate ...
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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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We know that physicians (and their pens/keyboards) are some of the main drivers in health care spending. But which ones are the biggest offenders?
A recent study from the nonprofit RAND Corporation asked this question and found that newer doctors tend to run up higher health care bills for their patients than their more seasoned colleagues. The study, published in Health Affairs earlier this month, looked ...
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-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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Past 6 Months
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