Many doctors are now getting into movie production and making videos that are loaded onto YouTube. These videos are effective in attracting new patients and educating your existing patients. There are a few guidelines that you can use to create an effective script for each of your videos. These scripts can be loaded onto your computer in a PowerPoint format and will serve as poor man’s teleprompter to assist in ...
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Planning a lengthy hospital stay is like planning any extended vacation or business trip, with the difference that transitioning to hospital life means transitioning to no longer being in control, where choice is limited, and where one is dependent on others.
Given my lengthy hospital stays as part of my stem cell transplants - some planned, some as a result of complications - the following may be helpful should you find ...
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“The question” comes in several forms: “Doc, what stage is my cancer?” “What is my prognosis?” “Can it be cured?” “Am I going to die?” “Have long have I got?” These tough honest words require courage. “The question” superficially asks for a simple answer. Time to live. However, in the real world of life and death, these questions and therefore the answers are far more complex and subtle.
Years ago we ...
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For thousands of first-year medical students, including myself, last week marked the beginning of classes and our official entrance into the medical profession. We sat through lectures on the normal functions of the body, and many of us even set foot in the gross anatomy lab for the first time.
At my school, we didn’t just delve back into the basic sciences—on day two, we also began a class that will ...
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Years ago, I attended college near the home of a favorite great aunt. Aunt Lucy lived alone in a tidy apartment with a tiny courtyard balcony, overlooking a busy Pasadena street. Sometimes, I would make the short, chaotic drive through the tangle of LA freeways in order to spend a few days visiting my aunt in her neatly arranged home.
I visited Aunt Lucy when I was in need of a ...
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An excerpt from Now It's Funny: How I Survived Cancer, Divorce and Other Looming Disasters.
What am I supposed to tell Luke? When do I even tell him anything? How do I tell him? I remember when I was a kid and my mother was hospitalized with some problem (to this day I’m not quite sure what it was) and she was gone for a few days and then back ...
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It’s easy for those with health problems to complain about what we don’t want to hear others say to us, but I thought it might be helpful to let others know what we wish they would say to us.
“You look so good, but how are you really feeling?”
It’s hard for us to respond to comments like, “You look so good” (or the always dreaded, “But you don’t look sick”) because ...
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My mother is my role model and my inspiration for what I do every day. She was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was in her forties, and fought it courageously for seven years until she passed away in 2010.
There are so many stories I can tell about my mother and her battle with cancer. Let me start with just one. Whenever she’d go to her oncologist, she would go ...
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I talk with lot of physicians about the need to improve the quality of communications between physicians and patients. Regular followers of my work will know that I am an advocate for the adoption of patient-centered communication skills by the physician and provider community.
Physicians with whom I talk seldom disagree as to the need for better physician-patient communications. They know that physician communication skills top the list of patient complaints ...
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Our septic tank backed up recently. When I say backed up, I mean, into the basement. And when I say into the basement, I mean, out of the bathroom and onto the carpet. And under the walls. The stars were aligned, and I had to go to work. My wife borrowed a Shop-Vac and rented a steam cleaner. I was assigned to call the septic-tank guy. The kids helped clean ...
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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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