Author's posts
I was a doctor. Could I also be a nurse?
Recently, one of my clinic patients asked me to administer his intramuscular medication injection. I appreciated the vote of confidence but had to tell him he was mistaken in thinking that my skill would surpass that of our nurses’. “Trust me,” I told …
What I learned from stepping away from medicine for a year
Before COVID-19, I left the practice of medicine for what would turn out to become an entire year. While away, I found a new way of seeing our hearts and bodies as humans in the medical profession, allowing me to return. Here are five lessons I learned…
Using the Avengers to explain how cancer treatments work
In a recent talk I gave for colleagues, I ventured outside the box. I searched for a metaphor to make cancer treatments easy to understand. Around the same time, it so happened my kids decided we needed to re-watch all of The Avengers movies at home. (…
6 resources on the power of narrative medicine
When I first turned to writing, I had no knowledge of the field of narrative medicine. It took four years of medical school, three years of residency, three years of subspecialty fellowship and over a decade in practice before I learned of it. (That’s …
A stage IV lung cancer survivor story
I want to share how the era of immunotherapy, specifically immune-checkpoint-inhibitors, has changed the landscape of community oncology practice in metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer, for oncologists and, more importantly, patients. I want to tell …
