Author's posts
How to stay relevant post-retirement
For a mere biennial fee of $525, I remain part of the medical community with a newly renewed medical license from my home state. I still have time to make a decision on renewal for the state from which I retired two years ago, only because their board …
A physician talks to his retired colleagues
After I retired, our regional medical center realized they had accumulated scores of physicians of major capability and stellar professional reputation whose careers had either concluded or entered their closing years. Though I had retired from a diffe…
Adapting medical safety standards to enhance police outcomes
As a resident in the 1970s, I used to receive the AMA weekly newsletter. A squib of a few paragraphs noted that the Alabama Medical Board had issued a reprimand to a surgeon for suturing the hand of a young African-American man, then removing the sutu…
A retired physician wonders whether to rejoin the fray
Many moons ago, in the 1970’s era, when no imposition from physically brutal on-call schedules to laudable scut to demeaning attendings was outside the boundaries of the house staff training curriculum, our leaders informed us that we were being introd…
Late-career physician? Change your life by being social.
Sixteen months into retirement, the absence of any externally imposed schedule still leaves me partly edgy. Medicare, COBRA, and cell phone bills come due at expected dates. The check goes out the next day, but it could wait another day or a week. Shab…
The medical record often doesn’t capture the care of the clinician team
While my forty-year parts warranty expired some time ago, leaving me with a snapped fibular styloid process not long after, the ensuing twenty-five years have not resulted in any serious medical encounters until last week. Following a very pleasant ea…
When a physician becomes the control subject in a study
When I was on staff at a large medical center, the CEO established four core values for the institution which he arranged in a diamond pattern: safety at the apex — think of yourself as a patient expectedly at the bottom. While it seems hard to assess …
The social isolation physicians face after they retire
Doctors by our nature do not handle idleness well. We value our vacations, of course. I never sought out a study to see if doctors vacationed differently than others. Some probably hang out someplace warm, others seek out the best eats of the place the…
Will medicine become a young person’s sport?
Six months have elapsed since exiting the pageant of my hospital via retirement. Like many people who devote countless hours to professional activities, some mandated, some by compulsion to detail, this windfall of unstructured time, no matter how wel…
Being on the lists of the best and worst doctors
As each calendar year closes, organizations compile best/worst lists: TV shows, movies, exceptional people that bring character or immortality to our year as it fades into history. Medicine has its heroes and scoundrels. I would expect that all physici…
