An excerpt from All Bleeding Stops.
Megan continues to take his blood pressure every few minutes. With growing tenderness Denis watches her fidgeting with the IV, biting her lip, eyes flitting from one machine to the next, desperately seeking the reassurance she knows will never come.
She thinks she’s not a good doctor because she hasn’t memorized enough textbooks or performed enough …
Advancements in health IT have created ease and efficiency in delivering health care that has never been seen before. Electronic ordering and prescribing have reduced medication errors from misinterpreting handwritten information. The interoperable transmission of critical patient history, lab work, and digital imaging from one hospital to another has reduced costs and unnecessary extraneous tests. Virtual care and telehealth utilization during the COVID-19 pandemic has revolutionized how patient encounters are …
Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Catch up on old episodes!
In this episode, we’re joined by Emmanuel K. Konstantakos, an orthopedic surgeon, and Jeff Morris, an attorney and CEO of the American Board of Physician Specialties. They discuss the ongoing debate about physician board certifications and the …
Working with and supervising residents takes a certain degree of trust. Empowering residents with trust can be a difficult proposition for educators. There’s a moment early in the career and education of an anesthesia resident where they earn the trust of their faculty and supervising attendings. This moment is not contingent upon the memorization of a textbook or the demonstration of intubation skills. It doesn’t depend on the recitation of …
An excerpt from The Medical Jungle: A Pioneering Surgeon’s Battle to Revolutionize Vascular Care and Challenge the Medical Mafia.
Still no matter what anyone said, I knew in my heart that endovascular grafts and endovascular aneurysm repair were going to be a game-changer and that vascular surgeons had to get involved …
“Musta been the ham sandwich,” he said as he leaned onto the operating table and belched a couple of times. We were halfway through an operation, and Doug, my partner, didn’t look all that good. I’d been in practice for all of a year, still greenish, and he, ten years my senior, was my guardian angel, my guide through the vagaries of the world of private practice, and the best …
I ran across one of those bordering-on-sappy Facebook posts that always pull me in, asking people to describe their job poorly and make it comically accurate. The photographer admitted she would flash clients, shoot someone, and then frame someone else. The bartender alluded to being a psychiatrist, marriage counselor, babysitter, and thirst quencher. You get the picture.
I am sure that each specialty in medicine has its own pithy, confuscating …
The skill
Patient safety, patient experience, workforce health, and cost-effectiveness are critical outcomes with an important common root. They’re all impacted by our ability to communicate effectively and respectfully. Additional terms to describe these skills include people, interaction, interprofessional, relationship, and social skills. They can even be used to describe behaviors inherent in many properties of complex adaptive systems, such as the butterfly effect, flexibility, and adaptability. The more we understand …
An excerpt from Doctor Zhulik.
Christmas Eve
“You know, you’re the worst f*cking intern I have ever seen.”
“I don’t know why the hell you’re even trying to become a surgeon, Appleby. You have the manual dexterity of a chimpanzee.” A heavy man, Bernstein’s belly burst out of the gown, threatening to push …
The senior medical student is hours into her on-call shift on her surgical rotation. She’s been up since four, exhausted, and can’t remember if she had eaten anything since breakfast. The staff surgeon on call “pimps” her on surgical anatomy, pointing at the various arteries and veins in the patient lying in front of them on the operating table. The student has difficulty remembering the various arteries and nerves while …
Surgical training has long been confined to traditional models of Halstedian apprenticeship, where trainees are guided—but also potentially limited—by their superiors. Within this dynamic, the transfer of knowledge from expert to learner is dependent on individual educators, which can then be easily affected by personal circumstances and potential unconscious biases.
Physicians are often busy and rightly focused on patient care, but this can lead to uncaptured and delayed feedback for …
When the COVID-19 pandemic began to dominate all aspects of health care, many of our colleagues opted to wear scrubs instead of their routine work attire and white coats. They cited concerns about personal infectious risk and not wanting to bring the virus home to their loved ones on their clothes. This reluctance aligned with research on the white coat as a nidus for infection, but it conflicted with the …
Historically, the Canadian health care system has decided what should be done for the care of the population.
Who gets care, when and where, what is a priority, what delays are tolerable, and what degree of saturation is acceptable in a Quebec emergency room? This paternalistic approach is obsolete.
A modern service company must be interested in the needs and desires of its clientele.
Other than in the health …
I’ve been in the health care industry for over a decade. Starting a few years ago, I embarked on a new project: building a case scheduling platform specifically for anesthesia staff.
I’ll be the first to say that I never envisioned myself becoming a so-called “health care entrepreneur.” From my perspective, I’m just an anesthesiologist who stumbled upon an unaddressed pain point—the tedious process of building OR case schedules—and after looking …
Doctors treat people in all types of situations. Life or death. Sometimes both. Babies die, children die, and teenagers die. Women die. Men die. Sometimes you even have the misfortune of delivering a stillborn. Everyone experiences death, but for doctors, it’s part of our daily norm. Day after day, for decades throughout their career, we have to experience death and the pain of others. Beyond being knowledgeable and competent in …
When I think of Big Joe, I see his overalls and how he filled them. And how a couple of months after I operated on him, there was room for both of us in there. Big Joe: farmer, salt of the earth, tough, stoic. And now, bright orange. My initial recommendation, while probably justified, damn near killed him. Big Joe hadn’t been sick a day in his life. He worked …
A guest column by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
The health care landscape has never been more complex. A deadly and enduring pandemic; health care delivery challenges that leave some communities at higher risk for adverse outcomes; an opioid crisis that takes nearly 200 American lives per day; and an ever-evolving regulatory …
An excerpt from Fifty Years a Doctor: The Journey of Sickness and Health, Four Plagues and the Pandemic.
It took me years to fully realize what a unique residency program I had enjoyed in my one-year general surgical training in Honolulu.
Early in this residency, we had state-mandated education in leprosy. All …
Get free updates delivered free to your inbox.
