As a clinician, you likely do not have the luxury of playing “Dr. House.” Patients enter your exam room, long story in hand, with a litany of mysterious symptoms involving every bodily system, and you were already massively overbooked. Your…
Category: Conditions
Why I help physicians write
Several years ago, I stood before an audience at a neurosurgical conference to discuss my book The Lobotomist, a biography of Walter Freeman, MD, an advocate and promoter of the controversial treatment of lobotomy. I gave my talk, and it went well. I a…
Military and medicine: 10 shared risk factors for eating disorder development
In 2017, I was medically discharged from the military due to an exacerbation of an eating disorder. At that time, anorexia nervosa (AN) provided relief from the depression that I had developed secondary to the multitude of stressors that came with bein…
Our vulnerabilities, when treated and acknowledged, can become our biggest strength
I will tell you why health care professionals feel they need to be superhuman, without needs or vulnerabilities. Because that is who we want to be, why we got into the field, and then our training reinforces those very ideas. We exist to take care of o…
Naming the anti-Asian racism of U.S. COVID-19 policy
It started as the “Chinese virus.” Then the “kung flu.” Then came the boycotts of Chinatowns, the rise in harassment, assaults, and murders. The recognition of hate and discrimination against Asian Americans was long overdue. However, anti-Asian racism…
Lesson learned: Pick your battles
It was a known fact — I was 4′ 11″ but I had a mouth on me to compensate. I was loud and noisy. Fellow nurses called me the “rebel without a cause.” But I had a cause. I knew I was David against Goliath. Almost everything became…
Recognizing and addressing medical malpractice stress syndrome (MMSS)
Every claims executive handling medical malpractice claims has seen it. So has every lawyer who defends physicians in med mal cases. They know how destructive this phenomenon can be to the defendant and their case, just as hospital administrators know …
A call to action for my medical colleagues
Modern medicine, a system originally designed to fix acute health care problems, now creates more chronic health care problems than helping to solve them. I see the dangers of over-testing and over-prescribing taking place each day in my day-to-day ped…
A surgeon’s favorite stomach surgery patient
High on my list of favorite operations was surgery on the stomach: The anatomy is neat, the re-plumbing alternatives clever, technical challenges rewarding, and, because it’s well-supplied with blood, complication-free healing is pretty predictable. Al…
A path toward clinical trial diversity
Minority and marginalized communities have historically been underrepresented in local and federal governments and in dozens of private sectors globally. Pharma is no different; there exists a steep chasm that drugmakers have yet to bridge concerning r…
