In medical school, I’m having a hard time choosing among extracurricular activities. Some of the difficulty comes from the fact that our mandatory classes are hard enough for me to manage. On top of managing coursework, I feel an enormous pressure to q…
Late last year the New York Times reported that Dr. José Baselga, the chief medical officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, had resigned for failing to disclose his conflicts of interest at professional meetings and in scientific and medical…
My friend and practice advisor showed me two very negative anonymous reviews of my practice this week. Both were posted within a one-month winter period and were written about family members. They were not written by patients. My staff and I tried dili…
One thing that gastroenterologists know about is stool. But, I’m not referring to that kind of stool in this post. Follow along. When we do a colonoscopy, for example, we are relying upon stool, or more accurately a stool, as in a three-legged stool. T…
In the 1960s, Lew Goldberg showed that a physician’s intuition and judgment can be fatally flawed. Interestingly, the same fatal flaw that was exposed by Goldberg is the same fatal flaw that causes some of the biggest financial mistakes that doctors m…
As first reported by The Wall Street Journal late last month, the war against anti-vaccination propaganda now has a new battlefront. Pinterest, the social-media platform where users discover images and information, has begun blocking vaccine-related se…
Thanks to the internet, collaboration has never been so easy. If you need to learn about how to install a new irrigation system in your lawn, the resources are a few clicks away. You just need the time and motivation to make happen. On the medicine …
Forgive the autobiographical nature of this post, but here’s a recap on how I started down the path to becoming an infectious disease (ID) doctor. To begin, understand that my first year of medical school was rough going. In hindsight, this wasn’t surp…
There is a lot of talk about team-based care nowadays, and I had seen some shining examples of that, most recently when a patient at my clinic had a suicide in the family. But at the same time, there are so many decisions – judgment calls, really – tha…
Recently, I wrote about some key findings from a 2018 survey of U.S. physicians by The Physicians Foundation. It’s no surprise to anyone working in health care today that the survey found alarming levels of professional dissatisfaction, burnout, and pe…
