A high school objective: take in young, immature students, work on them in various ways for four years and send them out educated, confident and purposeful. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Perhaps that’s the way it used t…
Category: Conditions
The Last Time negative visualization
An excerpt from Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. “One day you ordered a Happy Meal for the last time and you didn’t even know it.” — McDonald’s. No, this McDonald’s was not an ancient Roman contemporary of S…
Are we too scared to talk to our patients about their weight?
Talking about weight isn’t easy. Case in point, I was scheduled to perform five back-to-back fluoroscopically guided procedures. This was not unusual, but all my scheduled patients happened to be seriously overweight. Excess fat and skin made it …
Talk about death in plain, simple, easy-to-understand terms
“You’re dying.” I can often visualize the impact of my words as soon as they leave my mouth, the heavy weight sinking into the mind and body of my patient as they sit in the stark white hospital bed. It usually isn’t the first t…
The key to living with less pain is understanding what relieves pain, why it works, and how to achieve it
An excerpt from The Pain Solution: 5 Steps to Relieve and Prevent Back Pain, Muscle Pain, and Joint Pain without Medication. In a one-year period, more than 54 percent of Americans report musculoskeletal pain, including arthritis pain, low back pain, a…
Monkeypox: Should the hospitality and transportation industries worry?
The monkeypox outbreak continues to accelerate worldwide; by some counts, the U.S. now harbors the most significant number of currently known cases. Pathways for the initial spread beyond endemic areas for this current worldwide outbreak are thus far u…
It’s time to address pain despite the opioid crisis
Have you ever felt as if your doctor wasn’t really listening to you or was just rushing through your appointment? Have you ever felt as if your doctor didn’t understand the pain you were in or didn’t take it seriously? Most health care providers are ev…
We’re confusing resilience with grit
Reading many articles on burnout, physicians are understandably frustrated with being asked to be more resilient in the face of the pandemic, staffing shortages, and oppressive systems, to name a few. Often, when wellness is eluded to, physicians are e…
The appendix: an ancient organ for the modern age
An excerpt from Tornado of Life: A Doctor’s Journey Through Constraints and Creativity in the ER. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2022. The appendix is a body part with an image problem. Derived from the Latin word for …
Urging patience with patient self-advocacy
One conundrum patients face is the dichotomy of trusting our doctors whilst deep diving in web searches and seeking additional opinions. Another is when our findings and experiences do not align with our doctors or established practices and guidelines….
