I am at a conference that is encouraging physicians to engage in social media. This is something I was always a proponent of. I felt strongly that as physicians, we help set the tone of accurate medical information. Especially now in this age of disinf…
The eulogy of a profession should be a relatively uncommon undertaking. And yet, the death of the physician appears to be such a fait accompli that one feels late to the wake. It has been a long and lingering death, like the proverbial frog in the pot,…
Physician compensation in most employed positions is based on how much a physician “produces.” I work as a psychiatrist, and this amounts to how many patients you see per hour. The more patients you see, the more “productive” you are, the more money yo…
“I don’t know what happened” is probably one of the most common phrases any parent hears. Last weekend, while wrapping my son’s bleeding head in gauze from our first aid kit, this was the best explanation my daughter could muster as to why her two-year…
President Donald Trump held a rally near my medical school last week. While sitting in a small conference room during a lecture the morning of the event, my professor chuckled while clutching his phone. He looked up and around at all of us, remarking t…
As an elder millennial physician, I’ve been straddling two worlds, that of the “old-school” mentality of training and this newer one of “wellness.” I’ve become disheartened with new physicians being increasingly unable to tolerate any criticism by teac…
“Why did you wait to schedule this meeting until September, why not July or August?” Candidly, I replied, “I have a family and being on nights, spending those 90 minutes with them a day is very important to me.” It was then, behind cl…
Rural hospitals are closing their obstetric wards and stopping all obstetric services — at least those hospitals that manage to remain open at all. The tertiary care centers don’t seem to mind.Always wary of those rural hospital disasters in the middle…
In my first year of medical school, I attended a lecture on health disparities that focused on the difference in patient outcomes based on race and socioeconomic status. The lecture cited multiple peer-reviewed studies that extensively demonstrated the…
At some point in my career, I had the crazy idea that if I could scale the patient-centric work I was doing in my community at a small rural hospital — then I could make more of an impact. This is why, when a technology company came calling, dangling a…