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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
Transformation of health care is underway: The landscape is filled with innovation, and the horizon is dotted with technological possibilities of “Star Trek” ilk. In a recent New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst article, there was a compelling argu…
A male interventional radiologist who is active in the #HeForShe campaign recently told me that he is being pressured to stop advocating for women. My first instinct was the biggest sigh and eyeroll of my life followed by thoughts of locker room peer p…
