Category: primary care

The joy of a successful blood draw

An excerpt from Are You the F**king Doctor?: Tales from the bleeding edge of medicine. The vein stands up proudly. It’s good to look at; it’s inviting. The tourniquet is satisfyingly tight, the syringe waits like a shark on the bedside table, the new o…

The joy of a successful blood draw

An excerpt from Are You the F**king Doctor?: Tales from the bleeding edge of medicine. The vein stands up proudly. It’s good to look at; it’s inviting. The tourniquet is satisfyingly tight, the syringe waits like a shark on the bedside table, the new o…

Make sure your decision to leave medicine is not based on an emotional response

We know the statistics. More than 50 percent of physicians are experiencing burnout at the hands of EMRs, a nonexistent work-life balance and regulatory constraints to name a few. This is causing physicians to leave clinical medicine and find other wor…

Will robots replace doctors?

Among the many recurring topics, this year has been the impact of machine learning in our lives, especially the implications for our future work life. Prophecies range from ubiquitous utopian machine servants to a dystopian ravaging, hollowing out the …

A physician who is afraid of shots

This is not a story about anti-vaxxers. This is a story about primary care. Running a smaller practice, as I do, has inherent rewards and challenges. There is literature on both sides of the Atlantic that patients prefer small practices. Lately, consol…

The stories of rural physicians

This article is sponsored by Careers by KevinMD.com. When George W. “Billy” Campbell, MD, walks down the street, he never knows who — or what — he’s going to encounter. Anything can happen when you’re the doctor at Foothills Fam…

The spirit of Santa Claus in medicine

For longer than anyone could remember, he was the rural community’s pharmacist. A skilled compounder of prescriptions and conversant in chocolates, greeting card, and how to prevent a trip to the doctor’s office by using an over-the-counter…

Join telemedicine’s transformation of the health care delivery model

I came across Dr. Kevin Tolliver’s post, “Beware the Limits of Telemedicine,” and found it to gloss over the benefits of telemedicine and the opportunities that increasing telemedicine uptake can afford to the patient and provider. With thi…

How can we reduce the no-show rate in primary care?

At a quality and patient safety meeting recently, one of the departments was presenting their annual report on all they have done, reviewing progress that has been made around several quality and patient safety initiatives. One of their project centere…

The many benefits of strengthening the primary care workforce

The United States spends more on health care per capita than any other country in the world — yet health outcomes continue to fall short. In order to close the spending gap with other countries, United States health care policy must focus on reducing c…