Primary care physicians already have a lot of competition from retail clinics, urgent care clinics and telehealth services that cater to consumers. Now they’re facing a new threat from the “virtual primary care plans” that insurance c…
Category: primary care
Our work as physicians and healers is to see the whole patient
An excerpt from Recovery from Lyme Disease: The Integrative Medicine Guide to Diagnosing and Treating Tick-Borne Illness. As I write this, I am sitting in a hospital room with my wife. She had the sudden onset of severe chest pain and neurological symp…
When your future steals your present
My whole life has been leaping from one goal to the next. As far back as I can remember, I always had goals. Later in life, after practicing for a while, academic and career goals shifted to financial goals. But goals nonetheless. I never gave mysel…
Congratulations, you matched! Now what?
One of the best feelings medical students must have is the day they match into a residency training program. This day will end an era and starts another. During those few months before July 1st, all medical students go through this phase of mental tran…
A new system for measuring the story of my life
Our lives are stories, and we are the narrators. The stories we tell have an arc across our lives as the plot, characters, and climax unfold. These narrative arcs are expected, for the most part, to follow a linear path defined by time. I’ve been think…
Can science tell doctors what to wear?
In 2002, two Stanford dermatologists published a study in which they sent a questionnaire to a week’s worth of patients, asking them their preferences for how medical providers dress. The study covered relatively new ground. Two of the four references …
High-tech holistic medicine is the future of whole-person care [PODCAST]
“When we think about holistic medicine, many assume that it requires human-to-human touch points and, therefore, doesn’t lend itself well to technology and innovations such as artificial intelligence. In fact, holistic medicine and whole-person c…
Medicine’s contribution to my family
When my medical career was in its infancy, providing for my family after divorce meant moonlighting in addition to working full-time hours. Although it was my decision, I was torn between my children and my work. Time in the hospital meant missing out…
The importance of teaching young children about the existence and acceptance of LGBTQ people
I am a primary care physician for adults and children at a safety net clinic in Los Angeles. I also teach medical students. I am an out lesbian and am planning on becoming a parent. I struggled with my LGBTQ identity as a teenager in the early 2000s. I…
A medical student learns to listen with her hands
In my first quarter of medical school, we learned the pulmonary exam. We were told to watch the patient’s breathing, feel for any asymmetries, use our hands to gauge resonance and listen to all lung fields with our stethoscopes. It didn’t seem too dif…
