Doctors don’t like to go to doctors. I suppose we might see it as a failure or more likely it is pure intellectual arrogance. Whatever the reason, there can be no excuses when you need to get an insurance examination form filled out. One way of taking the edge off it is possibly to try to use your conversational skills to awe the poor general practitioner forced to see a …
Many doctors are now getting into movie production and making videos that are loaded onto YouTube. These videos are effective in attracting new patients and educating your existing patients. There are a few guidelines that you can use to create an effective script for each of your videos. These scripts can be loaded onto your computer in a PowerPoint format and will serve as poor man’s teleprompter to assist in …
A guest column by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
As an anesthesiologist and pain physician, I understand the complexity of pain management procedures required for chronic pain disease. Chronic pain is a disease like others such as hypertension and cardiac disease. Several interventional pain procedures can be dangerous, even in the hands of the most …
Unless you’ve lately returned from a retreat at a remote Cistercian abbey, if you’re interested at all in women’s issues you’ve probably read Anne-Marie Slaughter’s recent article in the Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” The author eloquently tells how she left her dream job in the State Department as the first woman director of policy planning in order to return to her husband, her two …
There was a night when I was in training that all the decisions, disasters and chaos, which are the practice of medicine, caught up to me. In those dark hours, I felt practically despondent. What I had seen left me in tears and overwhelmed by the tasks in front of me.
At that moment a wise attending physician took a moment to sit with me. Rather than tell me how wonderful …
When you ask young medical students why they want to be doctors, you will probably get all sorts of answers. Some may say they like people and want to interact with them and offer them help. Some students will believe this is their calling. Others still may state they are intrigued by the scientific mysteries the human body is filled with. From my experience, not many medical students just starting …
Some people critique Continuing Medical Education (CME) programs as spoon-feeding. As a young physician struggling to learn a lot of material, I actually appreciate a bit of ready-to-consume content that I can learn quickly and effectively. The American College of Cardiology (ACC) and other reputable institutions provide CME programs that, overall, help to keep physicians up on the literature and integrate new findings with existing knowledge. However, despite the basic …
Impersonal and self-absorbed as Manhattan may be, it’s still embarrassing to cry on West 32nd Street. I looked for a store, any store, and ducked inside. The pace of my steps and angle of my head as I buried myself into a back corner, thumbing through pants twice my size, gave me away. A store clerk walked over and asked if I was okay. I knew I’d have to meet …
A tug-of-war is going on in medicine right now between the past and the future. The present is confused and very unsure of itself.
Though I could be writing about health care in the U.S and the looming Supreme Court battle over the new health care law, I’m actually raising a much more intimate issue: Whether your doctor touches (examines) you or not.
Many pundits have weighed in on whether the …
There’s been a great divide between the medical and surgical specialties ever since I can remember. Surgeons believe internists perseverate too much when decisions need to be made. Internists consider themselves the true intellectuals of medicine. I suppose anesthesiologists like me fall somewhere in the middle–we work in surgery, but have to take care of all the medical problems the patient brings to the OR table. Does that make us …
You would think that for doctors, who work with life and death issues every day, the issues of our own frailties or the tenuous line between health and sickness for our own families would be, if not accentuated, then at least more immediate than to those who, say, do investment banking for a living. But the strange thing is that despite our easy familiarity with human mortality, it is not …
Do ear surgeons perform facelifts? Absolutely!
And we perform nose surgery and throat surgery, too!
A recent article in the New York Times presented a scathing editorial on complications caused by poorly trained surgeons. However, the implication of the title “Ear surgeons performing facelifts,” is misleading and overlooks the fact that a large portion of training in the specialty of ear, nose and throat surgery includes plastic and reconstructive surgery of …
I’ve only had to declare death a couple of times. Once in a three-year-old and once in an adult. In each case the heart had stopped beating. Death was clear.
Brain death is tougher to cope with, both clinically and psychologically. I imagine it would make anyone want to say, at some point, “Are you sure? Are you really sure? How do you know? How can you be sure?” Some times …
It was 1976 and I was a junior resident in urology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. I was assigned to a rotation in pathology where my job was to process specimens taken at surgery, dictate a gross description of the specimen and then place the specimens into the cassettes that would be used to make the permanent sections. I was transferring a prostate biopsy, approximately 0.5mm x …
According to a recent study from the Archives of Internal Medicine, primary care physicians are referring more patients to specialists than ever before. In fact, the rate almost doubled in the 10-year period between 1999 and 2009.
This drives up the cost of care, as specialist consults tend to be more expensive than primary care visits. Furthermore, specialists tend to …
Are doctors really going broke?
According to this piece from CNN Money, some are: “Doctors list shrinking insurance reimbursements, changing regulations, rising business and drug costs among the factors preventing them from keeping their practices afloat. But some experts counter that doctors’ lack of business acumen is also to blame.”
That’s all entirely true.
Pressure on reimbursement, combined with a lack of …
The principle of autonomy is one of the four guiding principles of medical ethics, the others being beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. It means that patients have the right to decide what is done to their own bodies. For children under eighteen, the age of majority, this means their parents decide for them. What happens when parents refuse a treatment that their child’s doctors recommend? (The right of a minor child …
What causes a doctor to commit suicide?
A story about a radiation oncologist from Springfield, IL brought this strange case to my attention. Dr. Thomas G. Shanahan committed suicide by cutting his throat in November of 2011. He was respected in his field, having published many research papers and traveled the world helping to set up brachytherapy clinics in several countries. He also had been an acting alderman in his …
Cancer is a dreadful disease. Just dreadful. Make no mistake: I have tremendous respect for the awesome doctors who treat patients afflicted with it day after day. Still, paradoxically, I can’t help but notice that some of them have just as hard a time as do other doctors with caring for patients at the end of their lives. I believe a large part of their difficulty stems from the ridiculously …
Although as a medical student rheumatology was always associated with an air of mystery and complexity to me – factors which might have aroused a younger me had they been associated with a member of the opposite sex – the specialty didn’t catch my eye at all as an undergraduate. To a medical student cruising for medical action in the 1980′s, rheumatology wouldn’t have got as far as a first …
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