Virtually every medical school graduate immediately enters at least three years of post-graduate medical training (internship-residency). The exceptions are those who:
1. combine the MD with a JD or PhD;
2. leverage the not-yet-dry diploma into a post as health policy advisor to a state or federal legislator, usually one of Dad’s chums;
3. are named Michael Crichton.
Commencement is in late spring, so post-graduate training begins on July 1. Every year my surgery ...
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As I contemplate retirement from clinical practice as a general surgeon, something I've been doing for over 41 years including residency, I've been having some unsettling thoughts.
Like many physicians, I've tried to stay somewhat emotionally detached from my patients. You must maintain some distance in order to be able to make tough decisions and to keep on doing surgery for so long.
I have written in a previous blog about the ...
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What does it mean to be a professional? And how do we maintain our professionalism at a time when things such as stress, burnout, and caregiver fatigue threaten our motivation? As an anesthesiologist, the ability to remain professional in many scenarios is something I constantly strive for. Aside from how it affects my relationships with the interdisciplinary OR team, professionalism is an important attribute given that my job requires patients ...
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I felt a woman’s uterus without her permission. How this happened, and why I thought I had done the right thing at the time, tells us something important about medical education and shows us why doctor/patient interactions often play out like conversations between earthlings and aliens.
To understand my inappropriate actions, you need to know something about the physical exams that we physicians conduct on our patients. More specifically, about the ...
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This series is brought to you by MedPage Today.
1. Omega-3s May Not Lower Cardiac Risk. Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid supplementation does not appear to reduce the risk of cardiovascular or cerebrovascular events.
2. Low Preop Sodium Raises Mortality Risk. Preoperative hyponatremia significantly increased the risk of 30-day postsurgical mortality, a risk that extended across all subgroups of surgical patients.
3. When Drugs ...
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My son had been having episodes of belly pain right around his belly button for several weeks. I watched and waited. Between these bouts of mild abdominal pain he was completely fine - healthy appetite, active, happy. But I had a feeling something was brewing. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. The disease finally declared itself: several nights ago his belly pain was severe and unremitting. He ...
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We’re not going for sympathy here. Doctors as a whole enjoy less sympathy than many other professional groups (members of Congress enjoy the least, I would think), and that’s probably appropriate. They have high incomes and many prerogatives and rank highly in esteem polls as individuals, if not as a group. It’s not where they are that is causing the grieving, it is where they are coming from.
Let’s deal with ...
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A guest column by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
As an anesthesiologist and pain physician, I understand the complexity of pain management procedures required for chronic pain disease. Chronic pain is a disease like others such as hypertension and cardiac disease. Several interventional pain procedures can be dangerous, even in the hands of the most ...
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Really, sir. What were you thinking?
I’m talking to you—the anesthesia provider (I hate to think that you might be an anesthesiologist) who allowed himself to be videotaped while a patient injected his own induction dose of propofol. Most people know something about propofol even if they aren’t in the anesthesia business–that’s the medication that Dr. Conrad Murray gave Michael Jackson to everyone’s sorrow.
I would insert the link here, but the ...
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Here’s a little story from the early days of my first job as a chairman of surgery.
Shortly after I assumed the role of surgical chairman in a community teaching hospital at the ripe old age of 40 and having absolutely no administrative experience, I visited a mentor of mine whom I had known since I was a medical student. He had been serving in a similar role at a larger ...
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-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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