A professor recently romanticized my idea of clinical reasoning as he began our session by saying, “When you’re a physician, you’re a detective.” He elaborated: “Every fact you have, every piece of evidence you have, must …
Category: Radiology
How a patient’s passing changed this radiologist
I can still recall my first day of medical school orientation. A humbling silence fell across a sea of 162 enthusiastic and largely arrogant aspiring trainees as the dean proclaimed, “As doctors, you will all kill someone at some point in your career.”…
We focus on the financial sacrifices of physician training. The personal sacrifices are worse.
The sky was overcast as my girlfriend dropped me off at the airport on a June day several years back. I was headed to Chicago to take the last meaningful high stakes exam of my medical training, a mandatory board exam available only at two sites, a tes…
The costly decision of delaying surgery
It was a common enough reason for someone to have a CT scan. The order read, “Abdominal pain, colon cancer resected in January.” It was now March, only two months post-surgery. Yet the patient’s CT scan showed a number of large masses in the liver, con…
4 reasons why this radiologist loves practicing teleradiology
Some radiologists perceive teleradiology as the “dark side” of our profession. I may have counted myself among those skeptics, but I now see the light and am happy to share a place among the converts. Most of my career has been in traditional private p…
A reflection of a physician’s firsts
Your first is always special. It is a mixture of youthful inexperience, awkwardness, anticipation, and giddiness that creates a cacophony of emotions and physical changes that is hard to describe unless you have experienced it yourself. Your repertoire…
MRI safety in breast cancer screening
The numbers are scary: The average woman has a 12 percent risk of developing breast cancer at some point in her life. For women with certain genetic mutations or risk factors, lifetime risk can climb to 85 percent. Even more terrifying than the numbers…
This story happens every week in clinics like mine and it’s got to stop
Jeanette Brown had lost twenty pounds, and she was worried. “I’m not trying,” she told me at her regular diabetes visit as I pored over her lab results. What I saw sent a chill down my spine: A normal weight, diet controlled diabetic for many years, he…
5 things this doctor wished he could tell his patients
1. I am not omnipotent. As health care providers our ability to treat is sometimes affected by factors beyond our control— limitations in technology, variations in our work environment, and human nature. While we always commit to performing our…
Radiation oncologists aren’t just strangers in the basement
“We have a consult for radiation oncology regarding a 60-year-old gentleman with a history of lung cancer and is currently admitted. His oncologist is Dr. Heme Onc.” As a new radiation oncology resident, I was surprised to hear the consulting physician…
