“As a young girl, I’d stand on my tiptoes, craning my neck to watch her sweep cerulean eye shadow across lids and smear foundation on sunken cheeks. While my high school friends resorted to secondhand eye shadow instruction from the pages of Teen…
Category: primary care
This physician loves primary care. A pandemic isn’t going to change that. [PODCAST]
“I just started laughing. It was early on Monday morning during our COVID surge. I couldn’t help myself. Phones were not on yet, but I already had triage COVID calls. “Put on your roller skates” was all I was thinking. I questioned my laughter. …
The world needs more hope-givers. Be that person.
He stood silently. His eyes fixed on us, immaculately dressed in a dark three-piece suit adorned with a gold watch and chain, hair meticulously groomed, a brightly colored bow tie centered perfectly on a freshly starched white shirt, wire collar stays …
PCPs could counter virtual plans by increasing telehealth visits
Primary care physicians already have a lot of competition from retail clinics, urgent care clinics and telehealth services that cater to consumers. Now they’re facing a new threat from the “virtual primary care plans” that insurance c…
Our work as physicians and healers is to see the whole patient
An excerpt from Recovery from Lyme Disease: The Integrative Medicine Guide to Diagnosing and Treating Tick-Borne Illness. As I write this, I am sitting in a hospital room with my wife. She had the sudden onset of severe chest pain and neurological symp…
When your future steals your present
My whole life has been leaping from one goal to the next. As far back as I can remember, I always had goals. Later in life, after practicing for a while, academic and career goals shifted to financial goals. But goals nonetheless. I never gave mysel…
Congratulations, you matched! Now what?
One of the best feelings medical students must have is the day they match into a residency training program. This day will end an era and starts another. During those few months before July 1st, all medical students go through this phase of mental tran…
A new system for measuring the story of my life
Our lives are stories, and we are the narrators. The stories we tell have an arc across our lives as the plot, characters, and climax unfold. These narrative arcs are expected, for the most part, to follow a linear path defined by time. I’ve been think…
Can science tell doctors what to wear?
In 2002, two Stanford dermatologists published a study in which they sent a questionnaire to a week’s worth of patients, asking them their preferences for how medical providers dress. The study covered relatively new ground. Two of the four references …
High-tech holistic medicine is the future of whole-person care [PODCAST]
“When we think about holistic medicine, many assume that it requires human-to-human touch points and, therefore, doesn’t lend itself well to technology and innovations such as artificial intelligence. In fact, holistic medicine and whole-person c…
