One of my favorite passages from sacred writings is the story of Moses, still tending his father-in-law’s sheep, an ordinary day in an ordinary place, suddenly encountering God, the ground he stood on now consecrated into holy ground, admonished …
Category: Hospital-Based Medicine
Physician informatics demystified
Nurse: “I need help with the computer; patient transfer needs to be completed.” Me: “Ma’am, the patient’s medications are on ‘MAR HOLD,’ which means Medication Administration Record Hold. Therefore, we cannot a…
I wish it didn’t require a cancer diagnosis to trust me [PODCAST]
“The medical profession hasn’t changed. Our credibility hasn’t changed. Our commitment to care for you – to adore you, to grieve your diagnosis and what it means for you and your family – hasn’t changed. Our advice hasn’t changed. I’m grateful fo…
CME budgets expire soon: Use it or lose it
Most physicians receive a budget for CME expenses, and many of those expire on December 31. It’s important to take action now – if you have funds left, there’s a good chance they will be disappear when 2021 ends, and you will then be spending your 2022…
VIP medicine: Where patients get bad medical care
Let’s take a pediatrics patient as an example. She has a rare genetic disorder, heart problems, is G-tube dependent, and home-bound. The child is also on countless medications and requires 24-hour nursing. The family is rich and pays 100 percent …
We must help physicians at the brink of burnout, depression, and high stress
One patient down. Nine more to go. My attending politely closed the door behind him and walked back to his computer to chart his patient. His pen crossed off a line from the list that he pulled from his pocket. His schedule was listed in 15-minute inte…
A physician’s rant. Written but not sent.
Once again, at 1 a.m., I was knee-deep in patient charts and the cacophony of messages that our “user-friendly” EHR employs to allow various staff members to reach us. One of these was about a simple, inexpensive radiologic test I had order…
Letting your resident break the bad news
How do you learn to deliver the worst news anyone will ever hear? And equally important, how do you find the resilience to go on when difficult conversations don’t go well? My profession for the past 15 years has been to train the next generation of ph…
Every patient is someone’s loved one
It felt like watching a train go by with no control over its destination and no way to stop it. We simply had to watch our loved one as he made his way towards death. The doctor said he had a traumatic brain injury with herniation. His pupils were fixe…
An un-apology: a physician’s breastfeeding isolation
This article was written before COVID-19 social distancing recommendations. I want to start off by saying that I fully know my breastfeeding journey is a success story. There are so many women who struggle with medical illness, latch issues, an unsuppo…
