We have embarked upon a unique strategy to assess and manage pain. “Opioids Rarely Help Bodily Pain” is not a catchy phrase but a mnemonic related to educational learning which serves as the cornerstone of a new acute-pain management paradi…
Category: Hospital-Based Medicine
The most loving thing: end of life and saying goodbye
“Grandma fell and we’re in the emergency room. She’s very distressed and does not look good. I’m going to put the doctor on the phone.” I could hear my mother’s voice strain on the other end of the phone line as I braced myself for my conversation with…
Respect the duty to care for all patients equitably
In my first year of medical school, I attended a lecture on health disparities that focused on the difference in patient outcomes based on race and socioeconomic status. The lecture cited multiple peer-reviewed studies that extensively demonstrated the…
5 tips for interns tackling a busy schedule
The rotations on adult medicine and critical care are probably the most challenging ones for the residents doing internal medicine residency. No matter how much we try, we tend to feel overwhelmed, fatigued and swamped sometimes. As we progress into re…
Sharing administrative pain might give us more joy in medicine
I’m still trying to figure out what happened. I don’t want to be put on suicide watch by the wellness office. It definitely began during our weekly noontime mindfulness session. I came in late, furtively signed in (gotta make that metric) and slipped i…
This residency interview season: Be the rebel
Ours is a chaotic and overburdened medical system. As a senior resident, there is every temptation to seek in our incoming classes more obedient interns and junior residents who would obey my orders as their senior without question. I challenge that we…
Every physician will kill a patient
How did I miss his hypokalemia? Two weeks into my intern year and my patient’s potassium returned at 2.9. Minutes later, he coded. And I felt responsible. As I explained to my partner how my patient had become pulseless after diuresis of his heart fail…
A research attending starts his month on the wards
An excerpt from The Perfect Dose. Walking towards the clinical rotation to take care of patients after weeks in the research labs was never easy. The long hallway between the two buildings had an almost transformative effect on Mann as he transitioned …
It’s time to view hospitalization as a procedure
I previously suggested that transitioning from the traditional inpatient care model to the hospitalist model inadvertently motivated providers to hospitalize more patients, specifically borderline sick patients. Our example was a 74-year-old woman wit…
Turning a patient: a nurse’s act of duty and compassion
I met a fellow nurse at a wedding recently who, upon hearing that I worked at a long-term acute care hospital (LTAC), shrugged his shoulders and said, “Oh, sure. A lot of turns.” I shrugged, too. He had belittled my work, but in a way, he w…
