Every day we get bombarded in the news with health statistics. Coffee causes cancer! Coffee cures cancer! And so on. Many of these are meant to grab headlines (and, these days, web page clicks), and the articles they accompany are often very poor at te…
At nearly every stage in our education and training, we find “our people.” Maybe it’s your table-mate in kindergarten, or the kid with the really cool light-up sneakers in preschool who becomes your best friend. Maybe it’s your next-door neighbor who…
It was my first week of internal medicine rotation. A newly-minted third-year, I was rotating on the wards back in the spring, when I met a 90-something-year-old gentleman. He had come in for confusion after a fall. There were no relatives or friends i…
Physicians across all levels of training are familiar with the widely recognized truth that our medical system is broken. This damage is evidenced by a paradox; perhaps it will become the great paradox of our time – physicians who were driven to a prof…
I recently started watching the HBO series Chernobyl, chronicling the events surrounding the 1986 disaster. For anyone who hasn’t seen it yet—I’d highly recommend this excellent production (It’s already deservedly won multiple awards). The great thing …
Do you think I went too far in my last blog post, calling out some journalists as “pontificating parasites” who love nothing more than to slam physicians and blame us for the cost of health care? If you do, then you must not have read Elisabeth Rosenth…
I am a critical care RN, and I violated my patients’ rights. For decades, every day that I worked in the emergency department or the intensive care unit, I violated my patients’ federally protected rights to participate in their plan of care. I didn’t …
Mr. O has a drinking problem. More specifically, Mr. O drinks far too much and far too often, and for reasons that can’t be addressed with the tool he’s chosen. I met him at what could be called the low point of his life, except I know bett…
On February 12, 2020, the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) announced that the USMLE Step 1 will transition to a pass/fail exam in January 2022 at the earliest. This move comes amidst increasing pressure on the NBME regarding its financial con…
Growing up in a Korean household meant that I had very little experience with the type of baking that most Americans are used to; My grandma made rice cakes, not birthday cakes. But during my third year of medical school, an intern recommended a show c…
