Recently, I was on call for surgery at a hospital in New York City. At 2 a.m. in the morning, we were paged to a trauma in the ED. After we stabilized the patient and moved him for CT scans and x-rays, I noticed a small stretcher tucked away in the back part of the ED, a place typically reserved for overflow patients when we run out of rooms.
The patient …
In his commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College, international affairs journalist and author Fareed Zakaria defended the value of a liberal arts education. “At its essence,” explained Zakaria, “a liberal education is an education to free the mind from dogma, from controls, from constraints. It is an exercise in freedom.” His speech, I imagine, was well received and much appreciated by the over 400 graduates earning liberal arts degrees that day …
I was on the cusp of my first year in medical school, and time was running out. Classes started in two weeks. I needed a place to live: Ideally someplace cheap, not too far from school.
There was an opening at Phi Chi medical fraternity, a large brick house of faded elegance located less than a block from my classes at the University of Minnesota. At $75 a month for a …
This letter was received and edited for clarity by Pamela Wible, MD.
Dear Dr. Wible,
This will be my last email to you because I am giving up on my dream of being a doctor.
I’ve contacted so many colleges and medical schools hoping to find one that would help me become a doctor for my tribe. Today, I finally got a response from the …
Before the 1980s, drug testing was uncommon. It was widely viewed as an invasion of privacy and an infringement on fourth amendment rights. Today, a medical student is likely to be drug tested before entering medical school, before clinical rotations, and/or before residency. If preventing drug use among medical students is the goal of these tests, they have failed miserably. Urinalysis drug tests are ineffective. But more importantly, they are …
As a future doctor, I believe that digital dialogue affords medicine a powerful responsibility to educate and engage. I believe physicians have a responsibility, as daily witnesses to the gaps and failures of public policy, to advocate for social justice and policy reform. I believe that medicine should extend beyond the proximate effects of illness and injury to address their root social etiologies.
I’ve always held these beliefs with firm conviction. …
Whenever new physician salary data is released, reporters and policy experts often compare doctor salaries in the United States to those of other countries: most notably, France.
And on cue, Vox’s Sarah Kliff — normally an excellent health care writer, by the way — is uncharacteristically lazy in framing physician salaries through a biased lens.
After presenting the data, …
I am an imposter in a white coat. I’m not sure if anyone knows yet, I hope I am good at hiding it. It’s a well-kept secret amongst all medical students. In the hospital, I am at the bottom. I know the least and have the least power. Most patients don’t realize this and look up to me like I’m an all-knowing, wise muse or something of that nature. Sometimes, …
I asked why physicians were dying by suicide. Here’s what they told me:
“I definitely graduated from med school with PTSD. It has changed me forever. My mom’s friend that I have known since I was born saw me for the first time since I went to med school and she [told my mom], “She has changed so much. Was it worth …
What do you do when your ideal residency program does not exist? This is a truth that all perspective applicants must come to terms with, but I was still hoping that I would be the exception. I had created my list of everything my top family medicine program must have, including strong research mentorship, dedicated faculty, and a welcoming resident environment, and I had an idea going into the interview season what …
Should medical school be shortened to three years?
I say, “no.”
Here’s why.
There is way too much to learn in 3 years. Unless medical education is radically changed, it will be impossible for students to memorize all the unnecessary stuff they still have to memorize, complete all their clerkships, and move onto the next phase — residency training.
I do not see how medical students can choose a career path before they have …
Match Day: It’s among the most memorable moments of medical school, a time when students, friends, family and faculty gather to open those coveted white envelopes. It’s the symbolic first step out of medical school and into residency, and a tradition that is beloved by many. Yet the matching process is viewed by those outside of the medical profession (and to some within it) as a very odd way to …
I was a junior medical student, wearing a short white coat, pockets stuffed with reflex hammer and spiral bound Washington Manual of Therapeutics, rubber tourniquet and pens and pads. I was on a rotation out at the Dwight David Eisenhower Army Medical Center in Augusta, Georgia. DDEAMC was not too far from my home away from home, the Medical College of …
While interviewing for medical schools last fall, I observed a strange phenomenon: every institution I encountered would underscore its student-run free clinic as a major highlight of the medical education they could offer. First- and second-year students would speak rapturously about the experience they gained from clinic. Working there, they said, reminded them of why they wanted to become doctors in the first place.
Today, the majority of all U.S. medical …
I first read Dr. Matthew Moeller’s piece from this past March for the first time this week after a classmate of mine passed it on to me. I’m a first-year medical student — bright-eyed but sleep-deprived, trailing the smell of the cadaver lab everywhere. I entered medicine fully aware of the long, arduous road ahead, almost exactly as Dr. Moeller described it; with many of my classmates in my …
In medicine, we pledge: primum non nocere. First, do no harm. But before we can do no harm as doctors, we need to be doctors. And before we can be doctors, we need to be human beings. Being a doctor is a great privilege, but it is a subordinate privilege. Being human comes first.
I distinctly recall the time in my medical education when I realized I was becoming more medical …
It’s common knowledge among third year medical students that statistically a lot of us are mentally damaged in some way. Knowing these stats makes us feel better about our ongoing feelings of low self esteem, high anxiety and sometimes outright panic. In the car on the way to rotations, regular starters of conversation are statements like, “Did you know 35% of med students are depressed at any given time?”, to …
An excerpt from The Heartbeat of Success: A Med Student’s Guide to Med School Admissions.
What’s all the fuss about extracurricular activities? Isn’t doing well in your coursework and on the MCAT enough to get into medical school? Nope. Extracurricular activities and employment are opportunities to explore your interests, become …
“Well, if medicine doesn’t work out, you can always fall back on waiting tables,” I joked with my waiter, who, like me, happens to be a medical student. We were bonding over completing our first year of medical school — he, in Detroit, and myself, in the Bronx. He liked waiting tables and decided to work during his last summer of …
There is a saying that you enter medical school wanting to help people but exit it wanting to help yourself. It may be a cynical view, but a realistic one. The criteria for being a good medical student are far different from being a good doctor. Medical education may be breeding a legion of self-serving, grade-grubbing, SOAP-note spewing machines rather than …
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