A speech to graduating residents. It’s an easy thing to count the number of seeds in an apple. In our residency class of 2018 we have nine seeds, and on your graduation, we scatter you across the country. You each carry amazing potential that we have hopefully helped nurture over your years here. You will […]
There are 168 hours in a week and 8,736 hours in a year. There are 10,080 minutes in a week, and 524,160 minutes in a year. Residents and fellows working in an academic environment often work close to, if not in large part, more than 80 hours a week, or 4,160 hours a year. They […]
One of the great myths amongst residents is that once they become attendings, they’ll have so much more free time. I’ll never work this much again, they think. This is the most time-intensive phase of life, and everything after residency is easy in comparison. Unfortunately, they are usually wrong. Statistically, working about the same number […]
An excerpt from The Choice: Medicine vs. Nursing. An extensive amount of data now exists in the science of choice. Social researchers such as David Kahneman and Dan Ariely have conducted numerous experiments which suggest a number of ways in which humans are led astray when making choices. An understanding some of these pitfalls is critical […]
How do I balance my home life with physician life? I really want to do a research study. How do I start? How do I get involved in my specialties society? I am overwhelmed with clinical duties. How do I negotiate for nonclinical time? My manuscript was rejected. What should I do next? I had […]
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 […]
