Shirie Leng, MD

Tele-empathy is not being empathetic over the phone. It is not crying in the sad parts of your favorite TV show. It is not beaming empathetic thoughts magically across time and space. No, tele-empathy is a technology. I should rather say, it's a group of technologies recently being created to increase the empathy of health care providers. "This is rich," you might say coming from an industry that brought us ...

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It is one of the most boring truisms on the planet: “Practice makes perfect.” It is also one of the most misleading. Practice merely ingrains certain patterns after deciding on the best course of action after constant criticism and problem-solving. Performance requires that the body forget the work required to ingrain the pattern and let the pattern happen. Performance requires that we drop all criticism and technical considerations. These two ...

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Attention graduates!  If you’re looking for a career with a ton of job prospects, look no further than an international classification of diseases coder.  This fun and fulfilling career will take you into new worlds of diagnosis, laterality, specificity, and nitpicky-ness as you dive into thousands of columns of numbers and qualifiers.  You’ll even get to call doctors and harass them anytime you want.  Sign up for your free brochure ...

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Ladies, the moment you have all been waiting for is here!  No, not affordable childcare.  Not equal pay for equal work. Not gun control.  Not abortion rights or paid maternity leave or a female majority in Congress or a constitutional ban on the words “chick lit.”  Girls, it is so much better than all that.  We got pink Viagra! Flibanserin.  Catchy name.  Addyi for short.  Approved by the FDA for hypoactive ...

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Fifteen months ago, the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency, or DEA for short, began an investigation in four states: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.  The DEA was looking for illegal drug trafficking, as they do.  But they were looking for prescription drug dealers, not Columbian drug cartels.  And they found them.  They are doctors. Forty-eight people were arrested, seven of them doctors.  DEA ...

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Out-of-context quote of the day: “We have no malls and no Walmart.  Recruitment is nearly impossible.” These astonishing statements were made by Elizabeth Nelson, a nurse practitioner in Nebraska.  She was not talking about teenage summer jobs.  She was not talking about professional Walmart greeters, addicts of cheap stuff made in China who want an employee discount, or people who really like Cinnabon.   ...

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Humans are social creatures who naturally evaluate where they stand in relation to those around them. I have no idea how this evaluation process evolved, but at some point we noticed that some cavemen brought more food to the cave than others. The idea was born that some people are better hunters than others. We’ve been trying to decide who is “better” ever since. The origin of the word "test" comes ...

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A few weeks ago I wrote a piece about performance metrics in medicine.  People asked me:  “Well, if you don’t like the metrics, what would you use?”  So I thought about this, and the best way I can think of to explain what I mean is to use an example from a different field: education. Standardized testing has become ubiquitous in schools.  ...

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I have been blogging now for about three years, posting once or twice a week and accumulating 240 posts.  I have my little flock of loyal readers and have managed to contribute a few drops in the ocean of the health care policy debate.  But just this month two pieces made some bigger waves, one ending up briefly fluttering about Twitter, ...

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