When I was a kid, one of my favorite hobbies was adding to my rock collection. In the summer, I went on road trips with my family to explore the national parks, and at every gift shop, I always gravitated towards the bin of tumbled stones. To me, this …
As we go through our careers, we are given the responsibility of educating the next generation of students and residents to become proficient and competent in medicine. In telehealth, which also requires training my colleagues, is it necessary? If so, …
Words are powerful. So few symbols can evoke such deep feelings and rouse incredible emotion: “I have a dream.” Language is the achievement that makes us who we are. But while you, I and everyone else employ the same words to communicate sh…
Kaiser Health News told the story of a 69-year-old woman who went to a new doctor for her annual check-up, assuming it was covered by Medicare and was happy with the visit until she got a $400 bill. Most Americans believe in “annual check-ups,” at whic…
When I was a child, I knew I would become a doctor. I liked science and taking care of people. We diagnose medical problems and prescribe treatment plans. Some of us perform surgeries and some focus on keeping you well. Despite this, I’m nothing specia…
This article concerns what I call the poor conversationalist. There are several common versions of this, and all of them have corresponding parallels in nonmedical settings. Often the most basic difficulty is one of manner. A good conversationalist is …
I think the time has come for us all to do a little more than put our 2 cents in. Our health care system is a mess, and while many of us fighting in the trenches and taking care of patients are working to make things better (despite the best efforts of…
There is a lot of talk about team-based care nowadays, and I had seen some shining examples of that, most recently when a patient at my clinic had a suicide in the family. But at the same time, there are so many decisions – judgment calls, really – tha…
“She is meant for more than just primary care,” mused an attending on my internal medicine rotation in medical school. He was referring to a particularly adept resident with whom we were working. This resident was planning on practicing clinic-based ge…
Telehealth, using video to have an acute medical care visit, puts some of the power of choice back into our patient’s hands. To best frame telehealth and its use cases, the National Quality Forum published a report in 2017, outlining the following four…
