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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
I recently came across an article in the Journal of Urology that was trying to understand the determinants of patient satisfaction in the outpatient setting. They surveyed 500 patients over two months and asked questions about demographics, expectation…
The doctor you are seeing may have already left medicine. Yes, you still have an appointment. Yes, they are still in the room, taking your history and performing a physical exam. But inside their mind, they have already decided. They haven’t said it ou…
As a practicing ophthalmologist, I saw many patients who had developed blurred vision, glare, or trouble reading. These patients needed to understand that cataracts were the cause of their vision problems and how the cataracts developed and how they sh…
