Recently, I made a doctor’s appointment with a new physician at a different hospital system. During my last encounter with our family’s primary care doctor, his angry, unprofessional and unnerving behavior not only scared me at the time — i…
Category: Hospital-Based Medicine
You are the reason I became a physician
I can smell the wafting aroma of frying onions and tomatoes as I am upstairs, just waking for the day. I am 10 years old, and these aromas are the staple of my childhood. It brings back memories of home. I walk downstairs and see my dad stirring the to…
You are the reason I became a physician
I can smell the wafting aroma of frying onions and tomatoes as I am upstairs, just waking for the day. I am 10 years old, and these aromas are the staple of my childhood. It brings back memories of home. I walk downstairs and see my dad stirring the to…
Dear medicine: I’m breaking up with you
I’m breaking up with you. I fell in love with you when I was just a child sitting in my grandfather’s family practice office. He put that magical white coat on me, sat me at his desk, welcomed in my first patient, and I was smitten. I grew up pla…
Medical students are more than just numbers
Student G.M is a 228. When she came to our school, she was a 31. When she went to college, she was a 1270. Now we must make this number a caring, feeling person who has the empathy to impact the lives of patients for decades. Makes sense, right? Wrong!…
Proper endings like this feel right
He was a logical man. A northeast Ohio man. Who worked all his life and worked hard. I can see it in his hands. They are entirely calloused with traces of grease impervious even to pumice soap. A family man. His wife and sons and daughters are at bedsi…
A case for resident activism
In 2019, residents organized coast-to-coast to protest low pay, unsafe working conditions, and insufficient benefits. Residents at the University of Washington and UCLA walked out of the hospital in reaction to stalled contract negotiations. Residents …
Is medicine a minefield of gender discrimination and abuse?
I am a 57-year-old female physician, and I remember an incident that involved a cardiologist on the other end of the phone, roughly fifteen years ago. I had recently started work as a hospitalist, and the cardiologist and I had never met. He clearly di…
Can empathy be taught, or is it innate?
In medical school, I was taught to sit down at eye-level when speaking to a patient, ask them how they’d prefer to be addressed, make sure to ask questions in an open-ended manner to allow patients to express themselves, and interject with “…
Medical error disclosure programs: Old habits die hard
A radical change is emerging from within our health care system: Rather than deny or defend medical errors, some hospitals are acknowledging them upfront. This enlightened response has been gaining ground since 2001 when the University of Michigan Hosp…
