“I wrote a 55-word story in solidarity with my medical students and colleagues I had invited to share their lived experiences during COVID-19 on our Stories in Medicine blog. I wrote out of a need to “unmask” the guilt and angst of some of my col…
Category: primary care
How to recruit more students into family medicine
In 2019, a Policy One-Pager produced by the Robert Graham Center reported that the percentage of the active U.S. physician workforce in primary care practice declined from 32 percent in 2010 to 30 percent in 2018. Although family physicians represent 4…
4 ways to decrease your dread of being on-call
Have you ever been faced with an upcoming shift at work and felt an impending sense of doom? This type of anticipation can be a real killjoy. However, taking calls, working nights, weekends, and holidays is all part of the job, right? Worst. Call. Ever…
Fascia in primary care: When chest pain is not in your chest
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” – Albert Einstein “Mr. Thomas, are you OK?…
Doctors: Never pass judgment on the human being in front of you needing help
Oh, how we all learn and change with our experiences. It’s one of the greatest things in life that most of us (hopefully) are not the same person now that we were a few years ago. Looking back to when I first become a physician at the age of 22 (yes, t…
Gender inequities and being a physician-mom [PODCAST]
“As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds day by day at an exponential rate, we as doctors have been called to duty in unprecedented ways. Speak with any physician in the last few weeks, and you will be hard-pressed to find one who didn’t feel an intrins…
Doctors are fleeing the medical field. Here’s why.
The first day I started work as an attending physician in primary care medicine, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. This was not the heroic, selfless, service-oriented job or the romantic life “as seen on TV” I had imagined. Riddled with…
Delivering health care at a retail clinic isn’t something to be proud of
When I describe it, many of you will instantly recall the Norman Rockwell painting of a doctor holding a stethoscope to the chest of a little girl’s doll. Historian Neil Harris described that iconic image, published in a 1929 edition of the Saturday Ev…
Choice is a charged word in medicine
Choice is always available to us. Choice is a charged word – fueling political debates and challenging concepts of freedom. Many would argue that there are unavoidable obligations, legal and cultural limitations that revoke choice, but at the core of h…
There is endless profit potential to treat chronic diseases
I have noticed several articles describing how antibiotic development has bankrupted some pharmaceutical companies because there isn’t enough potential profit in a ten-day course to treat multi-resistant superbug infections. Chronic disease treatments,…
