The pandemic has not been kind to mental health. We’re all feeling the impact of the last year and all that changed in how we live our lives. While rates of anxiety and depression in the U.S. jumped as people isolated themselves from friends and family to stay safe from COVID-19, there is at least one silver lining when it comes to mental health – the number …
Since I was a child, I have been plagued by words and thoughts (spoken and unspoken) that said, “You are not good enough.” I remember this very vividly as I walked into my new school as a fourth-grader in rural Ohio. I was so excited to start a new school, as I had always enjoyed learning.
As I walked into this elementary school, something felt vastly different. I quickly realized that …
Recently, a Harris Poll conducted an online among 2,055 adults ages 18+. The survey was conducted within the United States between March 25 to 29, 2021. The survey focused on individuals who had interacted with the health care system in the last year. The aim of the Connected Healthcare Study was to understand the impact COVID-19 has had on health care and communication with providers and gain insights into experiences …
How do people respond to a gift, especially if it is lifesaving? Pretty much as they would many millennia ago. Over the past five months, while helping inoculate about 100,000 people at one of Tucson, Arizona’s COVID vaccination centers, I was constantly reminded of Passover’s story of the four children. Each differs in personality, knowledge, and response to the ceremony.
Originating in Exodus and Deuteronomy, their descriptions mirror the people we …
I was 17 and a senior on the football team. It was the third game of the season. “Speedy” was our star halfback. The place Alabama, the year 1972, and Speedy was Black. Our high school was well integrated for the time because of its proximity to a military post. The majority of the schools against which we competed, though, were still largely segregated. Skin color defined who you were …
Over 20 years ago, physician and healer, Rita Charon, Columbia University, pioneered a renaissance of physician empathy and listening through what she termed “narrative medicine.”
Charon writes, “The effective practice of medicine requires narrative competence, that is, the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others…By bridging the divides that separate physicians from patients, themselves, colleagues, and society, narrative medicine offers …
Interviewing for medical schools was intense, excruciating, and terrifying. Despite the difficult questions, there are three that stand out to me. The first was to differentiate sympathy from empathy, where I spent 30 minutes defending my answer to be met with complete silence. He could have asked me anything, yet he sat in silence for almost my entire interview and asked me to explain emotional differences between two incredibly similar …
We physicians often feel as though we are running up Heartbreak Hill. For many of us, the spring in our step just ain’t what it used to be.
Pictured above is Ethiopian runner Worknesh Negefa, the fourth-fastest female marathoner in history and the winner of the 2019 Boston Marathon. We all understand why Boston 2020 was canceled and Boston 2021 is delayed until …
To be the best healers possible for others, we have to show compassion for and take care of ourselves.
I wrote a previous article published in KevinMD titled, “Self-care is not selfish: It’s imperative to save the practice of medicine.”
Self-care includes doing no harm to yourself.
During our medical training, many habits and thought patterns were deeply ingrained. These thought patterns, while they may have been helpful in …
An excerpt from Exhale: Hope, Healing, and a Life in Transplant.
Late one Wednesday night in the spring of 2013, I sat in the ICU at Tina’s (aka Doctor D’s) bedside. She’d begun to deteriorate from chronic rejection of her lungs, and I had put her back on the waiting list for a second transplant.
My feet were propped up …
“My whole world has changed, but my workplace’s expectations haven’t. I am paying twice as much for childcare and caring for my children’s mental health needs on top of my normal job. This has been going on for a year, but expectations for my performance in the workplace haven’t changed.”.
“I was watching an old home movie of my son’s baptism with my seven-year-old when he turned to me in horror, …
I am sure that I have post-litigation stress disorder. It does not actually exist yet as a recognized disorder, but I definitely have it.
You know what else? Countless other physicians have it too.
We don’t talk about it. Besides the fact that lawyers forbid you to speak of ongoing litigation to anyone, especially colleagues, there is such a culture of shame surrounding this subject. Although we now live in a world …
In 2019, we (authors SM, LC) initiated a research study on the experience of care partners of people with Parkinson’s disease psychosis (PDP). Among other activities, participants wrote a letter to their care recipient’s doctor to the prompt: “Understanding that you know the most about this person, specifically their PD psychosis because you likely spend the most time with them (certainly more time than the doctor gets to spend with …
Kisses, hugs, cuddles, breakfast in bed/beautiful brunch outdoors is how I remember celebrating Mother’s Day with my kids in the past, but 2020 was a bit different.
As a physician caring for children with COVID-19, along with being a mother of 2 young children, the celebration during this pandemic had been an unusual experience.
I vividly remember Mother’s Day, May 10, 2020
The first surge of cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children …
An excerpt from The Working Mom Blueprint: Winning at Parenting Without Losing Yourself.
My husband and I ordered a special celebratory dinner the night my first book was published. It was an important professional milestone for me, and I was proud of all the hard work it took to get to that moment.
“Come on, guys,” he called up to …
If your 85-year-old mother was rushed to the hospital, would you be able to get the information you need about her condition from the doctors treating her? If your college-age son showed signs of severe depression, could you talk to his therapist? What if your spouse or partner was in a car accident? Would you be able to make important medical decisions on his or her behalf?
To ensure you can …
Health care in U.S. hospitals is suffering from three under-recognized conditions that I will refer to as “Metris,” “Severe Metris” and “Metric Shock.”
Metris occurs when a health system begins to focus more on achieving certain metrics than on improving actual patient care. Severe metris occurs when pressured providers begin to base their clinical decisions on achieving a metric rather than on their best clinical judgment. And sadly, metric shock occurs …
I was on inpatient service and had already seen most of the patients on my list. I just had to see one more before I could call it a day and rush out just in time to take my daughter to her tennis lesson. I reviewed the patient’s chart to find out that her cancer had spread to her spine, which had incapacitated her to the point that she could …
“When a patient is dissatisfied with his or her care, he or she can consult an attorney, who will enlist a physician ‘expert’ to determine if a doctor has deviated from the standard of care and whether that deviation caused a negative outcome. Over the past decade of reviewing cases involving medical …
I am a palliative care physician in a hospital in our nation’s capital region. Like most urban hospitals, ours has been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. My colleagues and I are exhausted and emotionally devastated. We are not alone. Yesterday I learned a friend of mine from medical school, a selfless and compassion-driven emergency medicine physician in Los Angeles, died by suicide. Before the pandemic, between 300 to …
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