Category: primary care

As a pain management physician, I often receive requests to authorize or renew patients’ accessible parking permits. These usually are routine, but not always. One morning, a patient, whom I’ll refer to as Steve, came into my clinic. Steve …

Deciphering burnout can sometimes feel like interpreting the orders of your favorite attending physician. Though I don’t consider myself “old,” I started my medical career before electronic medical records, when paper charts were the …

I have always felt that I was in the mainstream of medical thought and actions. Recently, however, I have been subjected to a barrage of articles on physician burnout, depression, and even suicide! I am happy to be working in my medical practice. What …

I read in a dusty novel that a famous pirate said there are no legacies in this life. Our lives, he said, float atop a fickle sea, and when we die, nothing remains. Many hands work the decks and, in the process, are worn, discarded, and forgotten. The …

A windy, bumpy road led my family into Costa Rica’s remote Nicoya Peninsula, one of the world’s five so-called Blue Zones. Our arrival in 2021 satisfied a wish I had made while undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer to visit this fascina…

In my personal life and my training as a physician, the burden of “trying to never be wrong” was a mantle I was accustomed to carrying. In retrospect, it was probably a fusion of people-pleasing and perfectionist tendencies. Part of this ch…

In my work with thousands of overstressed physicians and over 175 health care organizations, I have repeatedly learned one lesson: resilience training alone is not sufficient to rein in the epidemic of physician burnout. If you believe, as I do, that p…