An August 2018 paper in Academic Pediatrics found an unsettling conclusion: Breastfed newborns have about double the risk of needing to be hospitalized in their first month of life, compared to babies who were formula-fed. The numbers are solid, and th…
Diagnostic errors (missed, delayed, incorrect diagnoses) are increasingly being recognized as a prevalent cause of harm to patients. At the same time, physicians are simultaneously under pressure to deliver high-quality, low-cost health care. How do ph…
Six months have elapsed since exiting the pageant of my hospital via retirement. Like many people who devote countless hours to professional activities, some mandated, some by compulsion to detail, this windfall of unstructured time, no matter how wel…
I was a resident. He was a physician in a position of power. He took things too far, and I spoke up. Here are some of the actual comments I received. “He’s just a flirt.” “You must have misunderstood him.” “What were you wearing?” “Somebody must have h…
Think all the way back to your grade school years. Did you know that your personality traits were starting to be honed for the work you do today? Let me give you some examples about myself and see if you can relate. I remember the praise and exhilarati…
Why is your hospital always full? Actually, it’s more than full. You have twenty boarders in the ED. You turned your postop recovery unit into an overnight surge center. Every day administrators beg you to please, please discharge patients, if possib…
Florence Nightingale was among the first nurses who started wearing a nurse’s cap. The cap was derived by nuns and represented those caring for the sick. Hair was neatly tightened into a bun and covered by the cap. Back then becoming a nurse was typica…
An excerpt from Rethinking Health Care Ethics. Health professionals have not been well served, or at least not well enough served, by the academic community of bioethicists — the philosophers, theologians, lawyers, and social scientists of variou…
I’m often asked to write and speak about being a woman physician. I don’t know that any of my male physician colleagues have ever been asked to talk about being a male physician. Many hospital systems have women in medicine groups, and there’s now a …
My story starts like most individuals who enter into medical training. I had the dream that being a physician was my life calling to bring physical healing to others. While I did gain medical knowledge and skills, I also unintentionally developed a jad…
