When a baby is born, people stop acting like themselves. Gruff grown-ups make goofy faces at infants. Nostalgic moms share their birthing experiences with pregnant strangers. Shy kids clamber onto strollers of babies they don’t know, just to coo at new…
If you have worked in the hospital setting for any length of time, you likely are aware of the physicians’ lounge. It’s the protected space where the hard-working medical staff can escape to catch a break or grab a hot beverage. The physicians…
Growing up, I was discouraged from becoming a doctor; I was too emotional. My mother, a geriatrician, worried about my attachment to patients and the volatility of inpatient medicine. To some degree, I understood her concerns; I’m tearful during goodby…
Wellness initiatives are not always yoga or nutrition advice or Zumba classes. They can also be filling clinicians’ requests or solving their problems. I first realized this when a social worker included receiving full-text articles that she requ…
A Kentucky judge rejected the claims made by a teenager who sued his local health department for temporarily barring students at his school who aren’t immune against chickenpox from attending classes and participating in extracurricular activitie…
My interest in understanding burnout among medical trainees started during my second year of medical school. With Step 1 nearing, I noticed a dynamic shift in my classmates. The growing tension, petty arguments, and constant worry surrounding our futur…
On this beautiful spring day, “Nature is my medicine,” wrote Sara Moss Wolfe. And yes it is mine as well. As Albert Einstein stated, “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” Some days that reassurance is all it takes to …
Physicians actually make good pilots. But, in 1966 they received a bad rap due to a report published by the FAA’s Chief of Aviation Medicine, Dr. Stanley Mohler. Mohler had a point. Physicians were crashing planes at a higher rate as opposed to the gen…
There are aspects of practicing medicine that will always be challenging and stressful, even in a perfect system. Avoiding dangerous drug-drug interactions. Keeping up with the overwhelming amount of new data on diagnostic and treatment modalities. Tel…
Five days into my emergency medicine clerkship, I had experienced a lot of firsts: My first participation in a code, my first CPR compressions, and my first patient death. This was specifically a code blue for a patient with pulseless cardiac arrest. A…
