“Sir, please calm down,” she says nervously, glancing around to see if anyone had noticed their interaction. “No, I will not calm down. Where is your boss? You don’t know what you are doing!” He gets up and starts walking …
Category: KevinMD
Talking politics in the exam room
I walked into my exam room to see a patient I first met two decades ago. His medical problems included poorly controlled diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and a substance abuse disorder. Over the years, our health care system has served him well …
How can we improve the quality of medications?
Do you know what it’s like to sit in a meeting and learn that something you hold close as a fundamental principle is probably not as fundamentally true as you thought? That’s the way I felt earlier this week while attending a meeting on the quality of …
My mother has Alzheimer’s: a caregiver’s story [PODCAST]
What is caregiver burnout? How can you recognize the symptoms? What are tips for new caregivers? What can caregivers teach clinicians? R. Lynn Barnett is the author of What Patients Want: Anecdotes and Advice and My Mother has Alzheimer’s and My Dog Ha…
Doctors make bad entrepreneurs
Doctors make bad entrepreneurs. I know I told you they make great entrepreneurs. But there are always exceptions. There are a couple of reasons why: They are all perfectionists They often haven’t learned skills outside of medicine They don’t have any t…
9 things I learned when I signed up for public service loan forgiveness
As someone who graduated from medical school with six-figure student loan debt, I’ve looked into several different loan forgiveness programs that will help repay what I owe. One of the most popular loan forgiveness programs is Public Service Loan Forgi…
The children of COVID
If you ignore the masks, the missing exam room toys, and the “astronaut doctor” PAPR on my head, you might think it was a regular day in my pediatric office. But it’s not. It’s a day where we are still all trying to push through the thickness in the ai…
Death still affects me. I’m not numb. I’m human.
It had been a long day. Our progress notes were done. The last scheduled case in the operating room was done, and it was time to wrap up loose ends and sign out my patients to the night team. But that’s when Room 4 died. I walked onto the Burn Un…
Where’s Waldo: Finding what’s important in the medical record
I did a peer review once of an office note about an elderly man with a low-grade fever. The past medical history was all there, several prior laboratory and imaging tests were imported, and there was a long narrative section that blended active medical…
Reflections of a critical care nurse [PODCAST]
“Grandma Lilly is 87-years-old and in the ICU. She’s on a ventilator with her wrists restrained to the side of the bed. Grandma can barely see because her eyes are puffy: scleral edema. And her heart races: 140 beats per minute. Her blood pressur…
