It hasn’t always been this way. For years, I worked at the typical high-achiever pace, like many striving to become a doctor. Upon entering medical school, I set challenging expectations of myself — graduate at the top of my class, study a relentless n…
Did you know, one in four people over 65 have abnormal memory impairment? This is the finding from screening with an objective test. In half of those who test abnormal, there were common conditions – such as depression and medication interaction…
In the emergency department, we see them all the time. The person with a medical problem too serious to ignore, but not quite bad enough to require admission. The patient referred to the specialist who comes back to the ER. “I couldn’t afford t…
I did not want a baby. As a 26-year-old third-year medical student who had quite recently ended a far from ideal relationship — of this, I was certain. On vacation, in New York City, walking in Soho carelessly, I laughed with my friend Noelle ov…
Next in a series. In my previous post, I explained the basics of my Healthcare Incentives Framework, which enumerates the jobs we want a health care system to do for us and links them to the parties in the health care system that have the greatest ince…
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 28-year-old woman undergoes follow-up consultation regarding a pre-employment physical examination. She reports feeling well, with no recen…
A lot of media attention, including television, print, and online sources, is focused on various plans to revolutionize the delivery of health care in America. Critics point to medical errors, waste of resources, and lack of access among the numerous …
As a young college student or post-grad, you may have accumulated credit card debt. I certainly did. However, somewhere in the process of “adulting,” you may have realized that having lots of debt isn’t a good thing. You may have even heard investment …
As an oncologist, I have seen the devastating impact of being told one has cancer. The reaction I most often see among my patients is fear that they’ve been given a death sentence, an urgent need for a plan, and hope that they will survive. I often wan…
Storytelling is as old as humanity. In telling our stories, we share, learn, and ideally pass along wisdom. As Isak Dinesen once wrote, “To be a person is to have a story to tell.” This story starts with PW’s cancer diagnosis in 2009….
