His face was four inches away from mine. I tried not to blink as he shined the ophthalmoscope’s light into my left eye and stared into my pupil as though it were the most interesting thing in the world. He frowned, placed his hand on my head, and used his thumb to pry my eyelid higher. He maneuvered for about 45 more seconds while I sat stone still, and then, suddenly, ...
Shara Yurkiewicz
When easy familiarity blurs the boundaries
When the patient jokingly touched my nose, I knew I had muddied the boundaries between us too much and it was too late to go back.(Note: Except for the aforementioned sentence, all of the patient’s details and quotations have been fabricated. Events from the interview and exam have been drawn from a conglomeration of patients and scrambled to illustrate a general theme.)It didn’t happen until the end of the interview, ...
What do you think caused your disease?
Our first assignment for medical school involved reading and discussing Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which describes how a clash of two cultures (medical and recently immigrated Hmong), miscommunication, and misunderstanding led to tragedy. Poignantly narrated, the book had the take-home message: if a patient does not agree with a physician's reasoning why a disease developed and how it can be cured, then even the best ...
When learning pathology, real color is difficult to forget
I'm starting to understand why graphic pictures on cigarette packs are so effective.We are studying pathology, which is the human body gone wrong. The photos--taken from autopsies--are gross, meaning their structures can be seen with the naked eye. Cirrhotic livers are littered with bumps and scars, the heart dies and leaves a band of black tissue behind, the lungs are stretched so far that they can't pull in the ...
What your patient appreciates, and what causes hurt and confusion
Listening to patients for the past two weeks, we learned quite a bit about what patients appreciated about their doctors and what had left them hurt and confused.The good:M., an elderly lady with a very close relationship with her primary care physician, said she had been to many bad doctors in her life. She knew right away that her current doctor ...
Praise nurses without comparing them to physicians
Doctors vs. nurses (or doctors vs. nurse practitioners, or doctors vs. physician assistants, or what have you). The debate is old, tired, unimaginative, divisive, and wrong-headed--for reasons that are too obvious even to list. Does it get perpetuated because it garners comments (175 of them, to be exact)? Snarkniess is not appreciated by this reader, at least.The New York Times recently ran a column by one of its editors, "
