Category: KevinMD

MKSAP: 30-year-old woman is evaluated for a 2-month history of diarrhea

Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 30-year-old woman is evaluated for a 2-month history of diarrhea with three to five loose stools per day. She has mild abdominal cramps, bloating, intermittent nausea, and mild anorexia that has resulted in the loss of 2.3 kg (5.0 lb). […]

What we can learn from the tragic deaths of CEOs

An excerpt from Dead Execs Don’t Get Bonuse$: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Your Career With a Healthy Heart.  The details of the careers and tragic deaths of these CEOs are a matter of public record, and the disruption that followed their deaths was enormous. Take Ranjan Das, for example. At age forty-two, he was the […]

What we can learn from the tragic deaths of CEOs

An excerpt from Dead Execs Don’t Get Bonuse$: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Your Career With a Healthy Heart.  The details of the careers and tragic deaths of these CEOs are a matter of public record, and the disruption that followed their deaths was enormous. Take Ranjan Das, for example. At age forty-two, he was the […]

Is cancer truly the enemy? 

Cancer is the enemy.   So, our immediate desire is to get rid of it, throw it away, and never hear from it again.  Current therapies that require living tissue are proving that false.   We know that your living tumor tissue is like your fingerprint, unique to each individual patient.  It contains information specific to you, […]

The present moment as a refuge

An excerpt from How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers (Second Edition). Copyright 2018 by Toni Bernhard. Excerpted with permission from Wisdom Publications.  In the years since I’ve been chronically ill, more essential to me than formal meditation has been mindfulness outside of meditation. Mindfulness refers to paying attention […]

It’s better to not go into medicine than try to get out of it

“Passion isn’t a path in the woods. It is the woods.” -Tom Robbins, “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas” I’ve met plenty of accidental physicians. These have been photographers, travel writers, artists, outdoor guides and chefs who awoke one day to find themselves doctoring. Their passions didn’t die — they were just delayed by lifestyle choices. […]

Medicine is a calling and being on call is medicine

Late one Friday night while walking the long and lonely hallways of my hospital, my mind wandered back several years. I recalled my first weekend call as an eager, newly minted nephrology attending. I had met one of my colleagues earlier that morning in the doctors’ lounge, whereupon I had been handed a clunky, black […]

There’s no textbook for when your father is dying

On my first day of medical school, my father, a dentist, told me he’d just been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Cancer had crept back into my life — except this time not into my body. At age 12, I was diagnosed with brain cancer. After an aggressive surgery, I was tumor-free for 10 […]

How the science of learning salvaged my college career

As an aspiring physician on the pre-med track (a microbiology and immunology major), I believe that creating a strong academic foundation, especially in math and science, is essential for future career and academic success. Growing up in Miami’s more improvised area, Liberty City, quality learning materials were scarce. Even when there were resources for active […]

Your greatest role as a doctor? Storyteller.

There are medical honors so rare you don’t even know they exist. When you’re trudging through the slog of PBK/AOA/other — ultimately meaningless — letters, these seem to be the definition of distinction. Just like every other lesson, a patient taught me what real prestige is. Well, it wasn’t entirely that Oslerian, it was the […]