I don’t want to go back. Starting at 6 a.m., the intern entered the hospital with coffee from the bodega down the street, anxious about the patients that were admitted to the ward the previous evening. I deserve it. At 8 a.m., he had already rounded on…
How did I miss his hypokalemia? Two weeks into my intern year and my patient’s potassium returned at 2.9. Minutes later, he coded. And I felt responsible. As I explained to my partner how my patient had become pulseless after diuresis of his heart fail…
An excerpt from Close to the Sun: The Journey of a Pioneer Heart Surgeon. In the third year of medical school, we were granted a three-month elective, during which we were encouraged to work at another hospital or in some medically related endeavor to …
Measles outbreaks across the United States have been identified with Texas being the 11th state so far to report an outbreak. The Philippines with over 2 million unvaccinated children has declared an outbreak of measles after nearly 2,000 cases and 26 …
The United States will be short 120,000 doctors by the end of next decade, according to the latest research from the Association of American Medical Colleges. That shortage will become permanent unless medical schools make the path to becoming a doctor…
An excerpt from The Perfect Dose. Walking towards the clinical rotation to take care of patients after weeks in the research labs was never easy. The long hallway between the two buildings had an almost transformative effect on Mann as he transitioned …
History is important. “The farther back you look, the farther forward you will see,” Winston Churchill once said. Particular to our profession as doctors, William Osler’s famous adage: “Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis,” rings tr…
I previously suggested that transitioning from the traditional inpatient care model to the hospitalist model inadvertently motivated providers to hospitalize more patients, specifically borderline sick patients. Our example was a 74-year-old woman wit…
I met a fellow nurse at a wedding recently who, upon hearing that I worked at a long-term acute care hospital (LTAC), shrugged his shoulders and said, “Oh, sure. A lot of turns.” I shrugged, too. He had belittled my work, but in a way, he w…
Somewhere between medical school, residency and fellowship, I lost my voice. I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I thought I knew where I wanted to be in my career, and how to accomplish those things … until one day, I wasn’t so sure. I don’…
