Embarrassment is a feeling of awkward self-consciousness or shame. It manifests as a sense of discomfort or even foolishness around others. Feeling embarrassed is emotionally painful because it means you feel uncomfortable with yourself. The problem wi…
Category: KevinMD
A neurosurgeon asks: Is your child’s backpack hurting her spine?
Running late for school in the morning. Again. You yell upstairs to your daughter, “Hurry up.” While she’s slipping on her sneakers and hustling out the door, you grab her backpack from the chair in the dining room. “Wow,” you think. “That’s heavy.” Ev…
How cartoons can alleviate medical stress
Comical cartoons about medicine and doctors help to alleviate patient fears, make doctors laugh, nurses think, and everyone else involved in the medical field ponder the value of comics. I have been involved in creating medical cartoons for 40+ years a…
Voice to text solutions could turn EHR-burdened medical professionals into doctors again
Just imagine the following: your assistant invites in Ms. Nichols, who has a migraine, a bad cough, and feels nauseated. You sit down, start talking about the symptoms, see her throat, measure her temperature, pulse rate, inquire more about the headach…
The challenge of solving back pain
An excerpt from Ending Back Pain: 5 Powerful Steps to Diagnose, Understand, and Treat Your Ailing Back. Copyright © by Jack Stern, MD, PhD. Published by Avery. All rights reserved. Most feelings of discomfort in life have clear solutions. For a stuffy …
Can humanism save medicine?
Recently, at medical schools across the country, first-year students officially donned the physician’s traditional white coat for the first time. The white coat ceremony is a powerful symbolic moment. It signifies that the students are moving bey…
Are teenagers more vulnerable to the effects of opioids?
The younger you are when you are exposed to opioids, the higher the likelihood of addiction later in life. The prefrontal cortex is not fully formed until the age of 25. This means that alterations in the “feel-good” neurotransmitters, specifically dop…
It wasn’t depression that led this physician to suicidal ideation
While researching for my next book, I noticed a peculiar trend: Most news reports about suicide linked victims to mental illness. It is nearly always depression, multiple personality disorder, or more depression. While it is true that personal mental i…
It’s OK to cry when a patient dies
As a young medical student, in my early 20s, I was still too inexperienced to know how a physician was “supposed to” act. But I took the model of stoicism that I learned from my East Indian father and applied it to the medical model. Lectur…
How studying abroad helped get me into medicine
Think studying abroad doesn’t fit with your future plans? Think again. Since the day I applied to university, I had been researching how I could incorporate global learning into my undergraduate degree program, while also thinking about my future goals…
