“A few months ago, I embarked on an ethnographic study to understand what health care professionals saw as the psychosocial needs of pediatric patients. This involved conversations with several doctors in Pakistan, who had volunteered to share th…
Category: primary care
Gender inequality is making burnout worse
The 2022 Medscape poll on physician burnout confirms what has been painfully obvious to doctors on the frontlines of COVID-19: Their burnout is intensifying. According to the survey of 13,000 doctors, the nation’s most burned-out physicians are t…
Medicine and motherhood: on call forever
My residency baby just turned eighteen. Obviously, he isn’t really a baby anymore. He is six foot four and going to college, but somehow, I still think of him as that little baby. Maybe I’m just relieved that “we” both made it to eighteen. By “we,” I m…
A call to action for my medical colleagues
Modern medicine, a system originally designed to fix acute health care problems, now creates more chronic health care problems than helping to solve them. I see the dangers of over-testing and over-prescribing taking place each day in my day-to-day ped…
Finding meaning with medical missions [PODCAST]
“One initiative that more administrators should support is global medical outreach. The ability to practice pure medicine, like the neighborhood doctor from long ago, renews a love for the vocation that physicians sought when they first entered m…
Burn out follows from physician to wellness director
Tuesday, at the podium in a small auditorium, I realized that my time was finally up. Even as an educator/administrator (non-clinical) physician, I was done. Preparing to give a canned talk — a requirement of my current career strategy — fa…
The inevitable reboot of the primary care experience
Visiting the doctor’s office can be a source of anxiety for millions of patients, who often fear unknown costs, an unexpected diagnosis, or exposure risk to diseases, like COVID-19. On the other side of the equation, business stakeholders of a communit…
Doctors are trained to lie
Here are the top 10 ways how and why doctors lie. See if you recognize any. 1. Doctors lie about work hours. When logging actual work hours exceeding the weekly “80-hour cap,” new docs are cited for duty-hour violations. Labeled as inefficient, overwor…
Patient care is not a spectator sport
By definition, diagnosis is “the identification of the nature of an illness or other problem by examination of the symptoms.” Unfortunately, that is akin to saying that cooking is the process of examining the ingredients. As a result, there is a tend…
Permission to burn the manual [PODCAST]
“I started planning my escape in late 2020. I would find a way to quit health care, to cease being a practicing physician altogether. Living the life of a doctor-mom, I felt consumed with daily obligations and duties. Guilt plagued me for feeling…
