Physician

This article is sponsored by Careers by KevinMD.com. After several months of intense discussions, "Dr. Joe Smith" thought he was headed from his successful two-physician practice to a respected practice with many more physicians. It was pretty much a "done deal," until he was told that the senior partner decided he really didn't want someone with an ...

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“For the rest of my life, I’ll never see her again or smell the scent of her unwashed hair. I’ll never hug her soft squishy hips or sigh when she tells me to stop sleeping, get up, and enjoy the day.” This runs through my head before I start sobbing in my car. Most of the time I feel fine, but when I confront the finality of my grandmother’s existence, tremendous ...

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Medicine is currently struggling with the problem of physician burnout and the specter of diminishing wellness. Despite concerted efforts, burnout continues to expand. In light of this, being vigilant for limitations in the current framing of the issue is prudent. Words express the conceptualizations of our world and frame ideas. Such framing is meant to be revealing. However, frames and the words that construct them may also be constraining. One approach ...

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As each calendar year closes, organizations compile best/worst lists: TV shows, movies, exceptional people that bring character or immortality to our year as it fades into history. Medicine has its heroes and scoundrels. I would expect that all physicians can instantly name five teachers who shaped them and five guys they scored as real zeros on their evaluation forms. For the benefactors, we not only gave them higher scores but assimilated ...

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In the last decade, specifically in the last five to six years, we have seen the gradual disempowerment of America’s physicians as well as their unfortunate patients. Starting with health management organizations, managed care, all the way to the insurance exchange, doctoring has been forcefully wrestled away from physicians only to be placed into the hands of large insurers, administrators and the United States government. The common denominator was never about improving ...

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We as physicians need a dose of our own medicine as a booster ever so often. I went in for a simple procedure. A lumbar epidural steroid injection for pain which has recently become more than tolerable at times — nothing disabling. Nothing that stops my everyday life and living. I didn’t think much of the procedure at all because I am at the other end of operating room procedures on ...

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The day is etched in my memory. The knock at the door. Two detectives and one police officer. I knew the news was bad. We sat at our dinner table, and the dreaded words came: “Your daughter is dead.” “How?” I asked. “She hung herself during the night.” My body went numb, and the moment became surreal — like I was watching myself in a movie rather than being part of the conversation. ...

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About halfway through the internal medicine residency, there comes a time when a resident must decide on what he or she plans to do after three years of training. We may come across a second-year resident saying: What should I do next? Should I become a hospitalist or plan for a fellowship? But in what? Cardiology and gastroenterology are fascinating careers, but is my resume ready for a competitive match? ...

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I recently met an old friend of mine for the evening in New York City. He’s a talented young orthopedic surgeon, who has already, in the short amount of time since finishing residency, experienced so many of the problems our health care system faces. The topic of conversation quickly turned to the current state of medical practice, the dramatic swing to corporate medicine, and the consequential loss of autonomy suffered by ...

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