Author's posts
Why don’t we do positivity rounds?
We love our morbidity and mortality rounds in medicine. A time when we can look over some medical mistakes and take some time to analyze what went wrong. We debate, criticize, and some of us like to imagine that we’d never make such an egregious error….
Doctors: It’s OK to sometimes suck
I’m here today to let you in on a little secret. It’s not something that I’m particularly proud of, and it’s work that I’m always trying to improve upon. But it’s true. And today you’re about to find out someth…
How you can show patients you are listening
Being a physician is an important role. It’s easy to forget the impact that you have on a patient just by being at their bedside. It’s huge. Have you ever been a patient? It’s an incredibly vulnerable experience. You’re not real…
Doctors shouldn’t feel guilty about sick days
It’s 2 a.m. And I’m in the emergency room. There are beads of sweat dripping from my forehead. One of my nurses comments that I just don’t look quite right. I can feel the urge to vomit and know where the nearest trash can is at all t…
Your medical career won’t last forever
“Slowly comes the hour, it’s passing speed how great.” – Samuel Cowper Our careers will end someday. Of course, we know this deep down, but I think we lose sight of it amid our training and the day-to-day grind of our jobs. But …
How physicians can become self-actualized
What really makes a person complete? What do we want in our lives, and what is it like to become our best, most fulfilled selves? In the 1960s, psychologist Abraham Maslow tried to answer this question. This eventually led to his well-known hierarchy o…
It’s OK to cry when a patient dies
As a young medical student, in my early 20s, I was still too inexperienced to know how a physician was “supposed to” act. But I took the model of stoicism that I learned from my East Indian father and applied it to the medical model. Lectur…
How illusions impact how we practice medicine
We can learn a lot about ourselves by looking at, and thinking about, perceptual illusions and our biases. Look at the image above. The classic, Muller-Lyer illusion. We know that the two lines are the same size. But no matter how much we intuitively &…
Physicians need moments of reflection throughout their days
“The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them.” – Achilles Charles Debussy Silence is an important part of our everyday lives. Yet, we often don’t consider its critical importance in helping us to reflect on what we’…
There’s a lot about medicine that is pretty good. Sometimes we need a little reminder.
Recently, I had dinner with an old colleague that I trained in residency with. It’s been a while since we’ve graduated, but the topic turned to how our lives have changed since those early days. Over drinks, my friend said something that stuck with me …
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