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…
Category: Hospital-Based Medicine
The personal and professional challenges of women physicians
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 …
Compassion, respect, and camaraderie are keys to fight physician depression
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…
A physician’s ex-business partner is in prison. Here’s what this doctor learned.
When I was a third-year resident, I was invited to join a practice owned by a doctor who had once been my chief resident. This was considered by all of my fellow residents to be the plum job in town, and I was thrilled. The doctor, whom I shall call “J…
It’s time to update the stethoscope
Perhaps the most important aspect of a physician’s role is our diagnostic capabilities. Truly, if we cannot identify and diagnose a patient’s pathology with reasonable accuracy, we cannot effectively treat them and may even cause greater harm. Let’s lo…
Do whatever it takes to conquer this depression. Now and forever.
“Ms. Taylor*?” “Yes, it’s me. I’m so deeply sorry to you and the team. You all helped me so much when I was here. But I started drinking a day after I left and blacked out.” Two weeks ago, Ms. Taylor was found by her…
Why would any woman discourage a man’s advocacy or support?
A male interventional radiologist who is active in the #HeForShe campaign recently told me that he is being pressured to stop advocating for women. My first instinct was the biggest sigh and eyeroll of my life followed by thoughts of locker room peer p…
What happened to the first name in medicine?
I cannot begin to count the number of misspellings that I have witnessed of my first name. The number of “As” and the pronunciation confuse both first-timers and my closest friends. Its spelling on my first elementary school report card set the rhythm …
A physician’s addiction to social media
For Apple iPhone users, the release of iOS 12 included a new feature called “Screen Time.” Although a number of productivity apps that offered a similar snapshot of phone usage were available before this update, I was never interested in quantifying my…
Reflections after a medical student’s first code blue
We were in the middle of the morning routine – sign out between mouthfuls of eggs and homefries – when the call came in overhead, “Code Blue, 9 West. Code Blue, 9 West.” Just like that, our team snapped into action, the continued banter only thinly c…
