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…
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 “…
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…
Just to give you my background, I manage a large hospitalist program for a busy downtown community hospital that is part of a large health system consisting of a total of 29 acute care hospitals in the same geographical area. One of the reasons why our…
In medical school, physicians learn how to diagnose and treat medical conditions. We learn about all the different presentations and revel in catching a complex or rare diagnosis. In essence, we learn to categorize disorders based on a cluster of sympt…
As a child, when I first read The Little Prince and saw the picture of the boa constrictor swallowing an elephant, I would often ponder what it felt like to be the elephant. Later in seventh-grade science class, when I learned of amoebae and how they s…
I work for a hospital network with the world’s slowest computers. I timed it: Last shift, it took me fifteen minutes to log on. The first computer obtained didn’t function at all. It had been worked on the day before by information techno…
About three months ago, something awful happened. The oncology nurse practitioner (NP) whom I trained for the past two years in my subspecialty decided to seek employment elsewhere in order to have a more flexible work schedule. My team and I lamented …
If you or a loved one has ever been hospitalized, by day two or two of your hospital stay, you likely remember the doctor visiting you every day but not staying more than seven or eight minutes or 10 to 15 minutes max. It may have felt like he or she w…
I believe in the practice of medicine and enjoy teaching others this amazing art. However, after experiencing nine months of interactions through medicine as the daughter of a sick patient, I struggle with my pride in the profession and fear of the he…
