I imagined it like a scene from the hit television show “House, MD,” only I had no “MD” after my name, and my striking discovery had come not from the accumulated wisdom of years of experience, but from a whopping five hours scouring the internet. In my exhilaration, I was perhaps a bit delusional, for I was convinced I had single-handedly cracked a mystery case that had left an entire …
Over the past 300 years, the peer review process has played an integral role in scientific publishing. If you don’t happen to spend your time injecting laboratory mice with toxic chemicals and submitting your results to the New England Journal of Medicine, here’s how it typically works: A manuscript is submitted to a journal using an online manager, after which editors screen the paper and decide whether it merits further consideration. At …
Helpless. That is how I felt when my mother found out she had a fibroid the size of a cantaloupe living in her uterus. In my role as a medical student I might have dismissed the finding as nothing serious, telling my patient, “Don’t worry, it could be much worse.” But as a loving son I was not quite as cavalier. At first my mother resolved to ignore the fibroid, …
I will never forget my first Kenny G concert. It was in the fall of 1994, just a few weeks after I had undergone my second eye surgery, which I had needed to repair my cranial nerve palsy. By that time, I’d already suffered through five other operations from the neck up, and in my seven-year-old mind, I had somehow convinced …
I’m two weeks into my psychiatry clerkship, sitting quietly in the back of a crowded Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and watching a middle-aged man discuss his past struggles with alcoholism. He starts with his difficult childhood, describing his abusive father. When he was eleven years old, his parents divorced. Soon after, he resorted to alcohol as an escape from his loneliness, drinking to “fit in” and impress his friends at social gatherings. As …
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