I love to travel. Last spring, I found myself on a plane headed for the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. I was on my way to attend a conference in beautiful Rockwall, Texas. After an uneventful flight, I took my bags, headed for the exit and as…
Last week I took the naloxone challenge. I walked up to a pharmacy window, waited in line, and requested naloxone from the pharmacist. She showed a supportive but knowing look, and I became acutely aware of the four people in line behind me. After givi…
“The patient-clinician relationship is dead.” Those of us in health care hear this refrain constantly these days, coming at us from all angles. We feel it in the wall that goes up when we turn from our patients to our computer screens. We infer it in a…
“Why did you wait to schedule this meeting until September, why not July or August?” Candidly, I replied, “I have a family and being on nights, spending those 90 minutes with them a day is very important to me.” It was then, behind cl…
There are roughly 15 percent of the nation’s children who suffer from a developmental-behavioral condition or about 1 in 6 children. Unfortunately, many of those children often do not get the help they need. Children with developmental and behavioral c…
I was standing behind my trolley in our local supermarket when, in my wallet, I came across that drawing of a human heart. In the miniature pen-and-ink composition, the heart is suspended between two birds’ wings. At the bottom is a dateline: Opioid Vi…
There comes a time in a doctor’s medical career when the demands of caring for patients is too much. To survive medicine, doctors put on armor so we can go into the battlefield of medicine and do the work we do. The armor is the walls and barriers we e…
Mindfulness, my own personal word-of-the-decade, is the polar opposite of multitasking, which is not at all what it sounds like. Despite popular opinion, multitasking does not help you to get a whole bunch of different things done all at once. When you…
When my husband and I started parenting, our only explicit goal was to keep our son alive and healthy and growing. We read many of the usual books about pregnancy and the early childhood years. We did not read any literature on equal parenting. At t…
Going to medical school was a dream come true. I was excited; I couldn’t wait. I spent my childhood dreaming about it. It was this amazing fantasy in my head where nothing was impossible, and I would be able to help thousands of people, maybe mil…
