The answer to physician burnout is purported to be resilience training. That’s like glorifying the natural ability of frogs to tolerate gradually heating and boiling water. Unfortunately, health care today has some toxic ingredients, and physician burn…
There is a haze lurking overhead clouding rational thinking. Thoughts wander back to times when my body was unencumbered, and I felt nothing was out of my grasp. Maybe that was an unrealistic thought, but it is how youth and inexperience protect one f…
Having been an improvement advisor with many quality improvement initiatives and collaboratives, I have observed that stories about successful initiatives too often leave out major relational barriers that got in the way as well as the critical interve…
I was in a discussion with a group of patients about how difficult it is for patients to get access to their own medical records. It was initiated after one of my patients was refused copies of her recent hospitalization. There is much confusion out th…
About once or twice a day, everyone on our hospital’s computer network gets an emergency message that scrolls across the bottom of our screens, highlighted in the colors of danger and warning. They include things like a notification that a partic…
The storage capacity of the human mind is amazing. One estimate of the size of the brain’s “RAM” is as high as 2.5 petabytes (a million gigabytes). The number is based on the total number of neurons in the brain and the total number of possible connec…
An excerpt from Dottoressa: An American Doctor in Rome. When I migrated from the banks of the East River to the Tiber shores the path was strewn with bureaucratic boulders, land-mines, and pitfalls. I offer the tale of my odyssey as an object lesson to…
Lucas McClain started smoking cigarettes in high school but switched to vaping after he heard e-cigarettes were a safer alternative. His vape of choice became the Juul, the king of electronic cigarettes — which comes with a king-size nicotine hit. Now …
A month ago, during a visit to her doctor’s office in Sequim, Wash., Sue Christensen fell to her knees in the bathroom when her legs suddenly gave out. The 74-year-old was in an accessible stall with her walker, an older model that doesn’t have brakes….
Several weeks ago, I began my studies for a master’s degree in journalism. I’m continuing to work as a physician, but for the next two years, I’ll also be gaining knowledge in an important field: health communication. I recall being a medical student a…
