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Category: Hospital-Based Medicine
The consequences of unmasking and ending quarantines
The CDC has updated its COVID masking and quarantine guidelines as children return to school and more adults return to work at the end of summer. Unfortunately, the new, less restrictive guidelines are premature. As most people know, the current COVID …
A friendly battle with a patient’s potassium
“By God’s grace, Dr. Sal!” “Yes, T.J.! What’s the good news?” “Guess what Mr. Thompson’s potassium is now?” “3.1 …” “Wrong! 4.1!” We high-fived each other immediately and bre…
My patient left against medical advice
“Mr. Stenson left AMA …” “Why?” I said out loud to my attending. “He left with his IVs in …” said his nurse in disbelief. An hour earlier, before rounds, I sat down with Mr. S to talk about his anxiety at…
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…
A room once full of vitality lies empty
More than two months after he died, his name still adorned the whiteboard of the hospital room he inhabited. As I stood there and gazed, recalling the memories he left me with, the nurse who tended to him entered the room and started to cry. Her love f…
The art of medicine is born in the unforeseen
It was 2:21 a.m., and the pager exploded in my ear like I had forgotten to turn the volume down before plugging in my headphones. The nurses told me your heart rate was getting faster, and your oxygen was dipping lower. When I made it to your room, you…
No wonder doctors feel like hamsters running on an exercise wheel to nowhere
Burnout. We define, measure, and talk about it endlessly but do little to fix it. Unchecked, it can lead to medical mistakes, career dissatisfaction, early retirement, provider suicide, and excess costs. With the recent pandemic, the public has become …
Keep us safe: Stop the violence against health care workers
Violence against health care workers has escalated to unprecedented levels in the last decade. The pandemic seems to have accelerated outbursts against health care providers online, in print, and in person. A man from Tulsa, Oklahoma, recently angry ov…
Controlling physician behavior
Some years ago, I had the privilege of serving as chief of staff of my community hospital. One of my responsibilities was to review complaints directed at doctors. Ten to twenty “occurrence reports” came across my desk every week. Most were…
