A wonderful senior resident helped me understand the goal of rounding. Rounds should focus primarily on understanding the key problems and the diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to those problems. She suggested that some rounds spend too much time…
This article is sponsored by Careers by KevinMD.com. What makes any particular job a “bad” one? Maybe the pay is too low. Perhaps the hours don’t work with your other commitments. It could be the commute is too long, or the opportunity for …
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. An 82-year-old woman is seen for follow-up evaluation of Alzheimer disease. Since her last visit 12 weeks ago, she has been taking rivastigmi…
In 2006 Dr. Tom Bodenheimer wrote an article that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled, “Primary Care – Will It Survive?” Dr. Bodenheimer spoke with great concern about patients’ growing unhappiness with their primary care phys…
Ask any physician what quality is, and you’ll get many different answers. You will hear answers such as “finding a cause for their pain,” “ruling out a life-threatening condition,” “partnering with patients to improve their health” or “offering the mos…
My puppy looked sick. Not just any sick but “get an attending, two large bore IVs, start fluids, get her on a monitor, move her to the resuscitation bay” sick. And I was scared. “You have to take her to the vet!” I pleaded with my husband as I sprinted…
November 2017. I was on my pediatrics rotation at a local community clinic. My attending asked me if I could see Johnathan (identifying information and event details altered to protect confidentiality), an eight-year-old boy who has been increasingly f…
America in 2018: 307 mass shootings in 311 days. Recently, a veteran with presumed PTSD shot up Borderline Bar & Grill. His Facebook declaration: I hope people call me insane… (laughing emojis).. wouldn’t that just be a big ball of irony? Yeah.. I’…
“If only there was just one more creative way to increase my child’s sugar intake,” said no parent ever. As a pediatric cardiologist, I spend much of my day counseling parents of children with obesity, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia. I tell them to i…
As an internist, I strived to give patients hope by prescribing therapies that increased their chance — their hope — of the best outcome and by encouraging them with hopeful words. My own hope was to care for patients until I was old. Just weeks after …
