My brother and I are both physicians. He is a pediatrician; I am a geriatrician and palliative medicine doctor. We are both getting older. My brother has been a practicing pediatrician for almost 50 years. He had a remarkably successful solo practice i…
My 20-year medical school reunion was a time to reflect: Have we aged more gracefully than medicine? The Class of 1999 carried books and wore pagers while scrambling to gather paper charts for rounds. Residency did not prepare us for the explosion of m…
What really makes a person complete? What do we want in our lives, and what is it like to become our best, most fulfilled selves? In the 1960s, psychologist Abraham Maslow tried to answer this question. This eventually led to his well-known hierarchy o…
How would you make sense of the following vignette: Over a 40-plus-year period, a disease (“X”) is diagnosed, its causes are defined, and effective treatments are prescribed 30-50+ percent of people working in your organization are currentl…
Access to care, patient advocacy, health disparities: These are all buzzwords in health care now. We, as health care providers, understand that we must do the best for our patients in the hopes of providing a positive outcome. So, despite our perceptio…
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 79-year-old man is evaluated for a 2-month history of progressive malaise and weakness, aching bilateral shoulders and hips, and stiffness …
As physicians, we find ourselves in higher tax brackets than the majority of Americans. With the graduated tax system here in the U.S., the more we make, the higher the percentage of taxes we owe. That is not just because of the tax brackets, but also …
Becoming a physician in 2019 presents its share of challenges. Providers must deal with reimbursement rates that remain a fraction of their previous levels, adapt to a fee-for-value model, adopt ever-advancing technology as an integral part of care del…
Most new cancer treatments haven’t been proven to help patients live longer or feel better. Instead, they delay the growth of tumors — which may be faster to measure but doesn’t necessarily indicate a tangible benefit for patients. But you wouldn’t gra…
The Healthcare Incentives Framework helps show how to fix incentives in health care systems. It starts by enumerating the five jobs we expect a health care system to do for us and then identifies which parties in the health care system (providers or in…
