I heard about you a few times before I ever met you in person. It was my first day on the palliative care service — a week that felt like a relaxing break from the sixteen-hour days I was used to on surgery. Many people don’t know what palliative…
Category: KevinMD
breast cancer
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Is there a link between readmission and a hospital’s non-profit status?
It was the middle of winter in downtown Chicago in 1995, and I was sitting across from an apologetic alcoholic holding a slimy NG tube. Mr. Smith, an emaciated man in his sixties, had been on my service for three days with acute pancreatitis, and this …
Negotiating lower drug prices in America: The tradeoffs are worth it.
Negotiating lower drug prices in America could possibly stifle pharmacological innovation. But it would reduce health care cost for most Americans — and that should be all that matters. If the United States began to regulate drug prices, medications wo…
The climbing rates of maternal mortality in Black women
To put it simply, I’m scared by news headlines and conversations about the climbing rates of maternal mortality among Black women. I’m not surprised, however. As an internist, I regularly marvel at the advances that have been made in Western medicine, …
The gender imbalance in nursing
The gender imbalance in nursing, our nation’s largest profession, is a slow-to-change and complex problem steeped in stereotypes, economics, unconscious bias, power, and privilege in health care and society. Along with other diversity gaps in the nursi…
Aging out of being a physician
My brother and I are both physicians. He is a pediatrician; I am a geriatrician and palliative medicine doctor. We are both getting older. My brother has been a practicing pediatrician for almost 50 years. He had a remarkably successful solo practice i…
3 tips for physicians to become better leaders
My 20-year medical school reunion was a time to reflect: Have we aged more gracefully than medicine? The Class of 1999 carried books and wore pagers while scrambling to gather paper charts for rounds. Residency did not prepare us for the explosion of m…
How physicians can become self-actualized
What really makes a person complete? What do we want in our lives, and what is it like to become our best, most fulfilled selves? In the 1960s, psychologist Abraham Maslow tried to answer this question. This eventually led to his well-known hierarchy o…
Why are we failing to solve burnout?
How would you make sense of the following vignette: Over a 40-plus-year period, a disease (“X”) is diagnosed, its causes are defined, and effective treatments are prescribed 30-50+ percent of people working in your organization are currentl…
