He did a double-take as we passed on our small town sidewalk the other day. “Hey Doc, I didn’t recognize you dressed like that, without your …”, he gestured to where my tie or stethoscope would have been. I was wearing a cafe-au-lait colored T-shirt an…
“I used to shoot people like you,” the patient said to me. He was one scary Vietnam vet, and I was one scared second-year resident. Though not Vietnamese, I figured correcting him wouldn’t matter. As an Asian American (Chinese on my dad’s side, Japan…
“Recently, I realized that something needed to change in my family life. With three busy daughters at three different schools who participate in multiple activities along with my full-time job as an anesthesiologist, my life depended on accurate …
The annual meeting of my profession’s national society last fall may have been the last old-school, convention-size, professional meeting I will ever attend. I could be wrong, but it may mark the end of an era. Disruptive change to the convention busin…
The alarm goes off! Code blue! Code blue! The code blue team rushes to the scene. The patient is unresponsive. There is no pulse. The leader of the code team looks at the monitor and takes charge. The patient is in ventricular fibrillation (cardiac arr…
I am writing this commentary in response to a seminal opinion piece published by Dr. Donald M. Berwick, of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston, Massachusetts, in the online edition of JAMA, entitled “The Moral Determinants of Health.“ In…
One aspect of medicine that anyone who reads my work knows I’m most passionate about is keeping excellent communication at the core of health care. It’s a vastly under-taught skill, and although medical schools are certainly getting a lot better at tea…
One of my favorite ways to spend an afternoon is perusing bookstore shelves and choosing books solely based on their cover. Wow, No Thank You is a series of essays by Samantha Irby that was selected in such a fashion. While the adorable fluffy bunny on…
“All too often, physicians and other health care providers have tried to do the right things for our patients to ultimately have had our hand slapped. So pause for a second, get the questions answered, know what future implications are for today’…
Many people wonder what it’s like to be an intern and how to succeed during your first year as a physician. Is it really as bad as everyone makes it out to be? Are you able to sleep without constantly thinking about your patients and the diagnoses that…
