Physician

Being humane makes you a hero. It is a privilege to serve. Be the voice, for those without! Six words. One Story. These are examples from the My Six-Word Story Project, an innovative activity that supports the psycho-social well-being and emotional resilience of our healthcare professionals. My Six-Word Story has the power to reconnect us to our purpose and connect us as a community. "It's your reaction to adversity, not adversity itself that determines ...

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American medicine is at a crossroads as doctors begin to reject a cruel, exhausting educational model and a minefield-ridden practice landscape. Hands wring over the worsening physician shortage, yet little happens to ease physicians' administrative workloads or student loan burdens. These challenges have led to unacceptably high rates of work-related psychiatric illness and suicide, with "
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National Physician Suicide Awareness Day was September 17, 2020.  Honestly, I hate that this day needs to exist.  Prior to COVID, physicians had the highest suicide rate of any profession, and we clearly needed to be having conversations about how we improve care for physicians.  Since COVID, the stress placed on physicians has increased exponentially.  In hotspots, we’ve felt overwhelmed and demoralized.  In the downtime, we’ve had to worry about ...

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The best part of my job is interviewing residents and watching as gears begin to turn in their minds when I ask:

• What made you decide that you wanted to be a doctor?
• What is your purpose in life?
• What legacy are you creating?
• Which position in your field will truly fulfill you?
• What type of community do you seek in order to meet your wants and needs?
• Are you ...
  
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I am an emergency medicine physician in an inner-city emergency department, and I would like to start by stating a simple truth: coronavirus is not going away any time soon.  Cases are climbing in practically every state and show no signs of slowing down. From my personal perspective, things are getting worse. Every day I am treating more and more patients who are ill with COVID-19 ...

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Twenty-five years have passed since I finished my residency, and a lot has changed. Back then, we hand wrote all our notes, and the only time we looked at a computer screen was to obtain laboratory results. Now, residents spend more time in front of a computer screen than at the bedside. I contend that electronic health records (EHR) are an obstacle to learning the art and practice of medicine during ...

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My favorite patients were the older physicians who came to me as patients. I was humbled, grateful, and awed by each of them. For some reason, I had quite a few physicians as patients, and caring for this group is interesting. It was not until I got old enough and had issues needing a doctor for myself that I learned how hard it is to walk both sides of that ...

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The number of women going into medical school has risen to top the number of men admitted. Harvard has its first Black woman student body president. I am seeing more and more women sharing their experiences and uplifting other women in my physician coaching groups. “It’s like, we’re not going to take this anymore,” said Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, referring to sexist comments made by a colleague in Congress. You have to admire ...

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, a glaring trend has emerged, one that has long helped forge the American religious cultural landscape, but has now blossomed in full force, particularly within many Christian fundamentalist circles. As a physician who is also an evangelical Christian, I constantly live with the tension of balancing the practice of my faith and the results of sound scientific investigation with the opinions of patients and others within ...

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