I’ve been a doctor for one year. Two years of clinical rotations in medical school ill-prepared me for the reality of this job. Not that I went to bad medical school by any means; working in health care is simply something you can’t learn from a textbook or even on the sidelines as a marginally […]
Since the two very sudden public suicide deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, society has again recognized that we never know what is under the surface of another’s façade. As physicians, these tragic occurrences emphasize that our caregiving requires seeing the entirety of an individual’s many parts. While we acknowledge that the façade is […]
The recent prominence of the #MeToo movement has shined a light at many places in our society where insidious or even obvious sexism against women has long gone unremarked. Even when noticed it’s just shrugged off as the way things are. In honor of this, #MeToo was named Person of the Year for 2017 by Time Magazine. Medicine […]
When we think of bullying, we’re usually worrying about our school-age kids or remembering bad experiences from high school. We learn quickly in the health care field that bullies don’t change once they enter the clinical world. Health care, with its incredible differential in knowledge, authority and pay creates large power differentials and easily generates […]
Altruism is killing us. Take a second to let that sink in. Truly think about it. Resist your conditioning to refute this claim and try to apply it to your life. Still having trouble? Let me try to explain. In order to understand the truly destructive force of altruism on medicine, one must first define […]
Summer is upon us, and with it comes the end of the academic year, graduations and the arrival of the newest crop of interns. Soon these fresh-faced physicians will enter into one of the most remarkable educational experiences of their medical careers: residency. Many of these soon-to-be-interns are looking to attendings now for advice on […]
