It doesn’t take long in the practice of medicine, indeed in the training for the practice of medicine, to learn humility. To understand our limits in our understanding of a disease process, in our abilities to heal patients, and in our own importance in the grand scheme of things. Yet as physicians and as experts […]
Living in Fear – When Patients Kill Doctors
As humans, we judge the people that we meet even before we know anything about them. Even before we hear what they have to say, we have categorized them in a box – “nice”, “stupid”, “racist”. When we hear bad or unpleasant news, it is tough for us to separate our feelings about that news […]
Ruining Summer One Patient At A Time
I was taking care of a middle-aged patient recently who was experiencing a recurrent bout of diverticulitis this time severe and with a small abscess. It’s at a stage where surgery to remove part of the colon is necessary but the surgeon wants to let things “cool down” for a few weeks. So my role […]
Is It Time To Loosen Purse Strings?
Major life milestone alert. Yes indeed. Finally, after five years I have watched my $230,000 student loan debt dwindle down to ZERO. Hallelujah! It has not been easy but I can say now “never again!” What misery those years were. I did not know when I signed the promissory notes for each of those loans […]
The Disneyland Measles Outbreak
When I was a first year infectious disease fellow there was a lot of chatter about measles. A young student from India had just been diagnosed. It was another of the smattering of measles cases in Boston in that time-frame. By the time I came around though, the faculty was tired of hearing fellows presenting measles cases at the […]
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