I wrote this a decade ago: It is a brave new world. I have used an electronic health record in my office for ten years. With a click of a mouse, I can show you how your blood pressure has varied over the last ten years. I can graph your hemoglobin, tra…
Moving to the Bay Area from the Midwest was a culture shock in many ways. I was amazed by the diversity, the food, the openness of opinions. And I was struck by the traffic, the stark differences driving from one community to another and the homelessne…
In a previous post on LGBTQ care, Dr. Carlene MacMillan called attention to the importance of respecting patients’ pronouns. As she points out, discrepancies between patients’ chosen names/pronouns and gender markers on official documents can pose real…
Doctors are regularly deluged with advice on how to engage patients. But how can you, as a patient, get your doctor to engage with you as a person truly? Your health — and even your life — could depend upon it. A perceived absence of empathy can signif…
Corporate health care mentality set up nurses up to be inhuman while holding us to superhuman expectations. We’re told to be caring — but not allowed to do it. It’s time to demand that we stop being abandoned and dismissed by dysfunctional leadership. …
A couple of years ago, I read an article by Dr. Profeta at LinkedIn called “These four words that may offend you … may also just save you.” He was invited to talk about burnout in medicine and did not get a warm reception. “It&#…
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be keynoting AACE 2019, the annual meeting of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, April 27, 2019 in Los Angeles, CA. Health professionals often hear about social media from a perspective …
On a recent vacation, I went out to eat at a small, out-of-the-way restaurant we always visit on our trips to the Outer Banks. There, I spotted a poster on the wall explaining why the cafe no longer uses plastic bags or plastic straws: to keep the mate…
As the health care landscape evolves, health care provider roles continue to shift. Industries recognize the power of collaboration and the strength of communication between different providers; among those, the pharmacist and the physician. Unfortunat…
In observing trends among my patient encounters, to me, there appears to be a distinct difference in clinical encounters between more “holistically-minded” patients and more “traditionally-minded” patients, for lack of better te…
