Category: KevinMD

A conversation with a doctor who was tired of feeling burned out

An excerpt from the Docs Outside the Box podcast, episode 1:  When the going gets tough… MOVE!  Dr. Nii: All right, well thank you very much for joining us on the Doc’s Outside-the-Box podcast. You are our first guest — first victim, I guess. It’s the inaugural episode, so I just wanted to thank you for joining […]

What’s better: mentorship or sponsorship?

Literature coming from business and human resource management suggests that women are over-mentored and unders-ponsored. However, if you have been reading reports about women in medicine, then you likely have heard that women are both over-mentored and under-mentored. Where does the truth lie? That depends on various factors including the definitions of these terms. What […]

Prescription drugs are killing students and the educational system

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 63,632 individuals died in 2016 as a result of drug overdose. Among these, 66 percent died from opioid overdose. The statistics are derived from in-depth research that was carried out by the research institute in 2016. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that cases […]

The problem with the adults in Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why

Just like so many teenagers out there, I found myself hooked on the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why from the first episode. The only difference is that I am not a teenager, but a physician practicing child and adolescent psychiatry and managing inpatient child and adolescent psychiatric units for the last nine years. I was […]

A physician’s warning on the keto diet

The keto diet has recently garnered much fame for its apparent ability to improve diabetes and obesity – results so impressive the Journal of the American Medical Association recently highlighted the diet and thereby christened it as something more than a low-carb craze. However, not all the evidence supports such a positive outlook, leading the […]

Caregivers have the power to prevent medical error

What if it is your parent? Your spouse? Your child? Imagine supporting a loved one through a journey of serious illness. You go to all the appointments, know all the medications, almost feel the aches and pains as if they were our own. You repeat the same thing over and over again to one doctor […]

If Facebook knows me better than my spouse, why does my doctor know so little?

A few months ago, I was on call and admitted a 65-year-old man to the intensive care unit for a flare of his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Although he had only gotten to the point of being unable to speak full sentences between gasps for breath for only a few days, his story started […]

Crying when a patient suffers a devastating loss

I was a second-year resident, doing a 24-hour shift on maternity care. I’d spent some arduous nights on call with my attending physician, Dr. Campbell. Now, we sat at the nursing station, joking about what this one might bring. “You must be a black cloud,” she teased, accusing me of being one of those unfortunate […]

3 steps for doctors to move into the next level of career growth

In medicine, this is the time when one season ends, and another begins. New doctors graduate medical school. They are excited and, at the same time scared, as they enter into residency training. Interns become residents. Senior residents celebrate moving into attending positions or look forward to subspecialty training in fellowship programs. It’s the excitement […]

The freedom to admit someone because it was the right thing to do

The most high-powered rotation in my medical school was endocrinology. There, you got to see things most doctors never come close to diagnosing themselves. Uppsala University’s Akademiska Hospital served as a referral center for the Swedish population north of Uppsala, an area the size and shape of California. Back in the seventies, laboratory testing wasn’t […]