Sofia Dobrin is a neurologist and physician life coach.
Like most existential questions, the answer to this question really depends on who you ask.
A patient may have one answer, and a physician a completely different response.
Ask ten people, and you’re likely to get ten different replies.
What does being a great doctor mean to you?
If you’re a doctor, this is an important question to ask yourself because your answers impact how you practice and interact with your patients. Even more …
Difficult patients.
We’ve all encountered them.
Maybe we are them. (After all, they say doctors make the worst patients, and there’s probably some truth to that.)
But what makes a patient “difficult”?
Is it someone with multiple complex medical issues or a condition you haven’t been able to diagnose or don’t fully understand?
Is it someone with many questions, especially right at the end of their visit?
Is it someone who doesn’t follow your treatment plan …
One of my most stressful high school class memories was an AP English class I took during my junior year. Each week, we had timed writings where we were given a specific amount of time to write an essay on a given topic. As soon as the timer went off, we had to put our pencils down and raise our hands, signaling that we were done, regardless of what was …
One thing that has changed in medicine over my career is the emphasis on patient reviews. As time has passed, more of what we do as physicians has been attached to various metrics, and our identities and success or lack thereof have been defined by these metrics. A huge part of these metrics is patient reviews. In speaking with many of my fellow physicians and seeing numerous comments on physician …
When most people think of physicians, they think of the class nerds or the smart kids who got all As and took honors classes and were on the debate and math teams, did the science Olympiad or won the spelling bee. They think of us as brighter and more intelligent than most of society.
But we are also just human beings who have the same flawed brains and make the same …
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