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 […]
Care by ID Physicians as Unreimbursed Care
I’ve often written about the low salary of infectious disease (ID) physicians as compared to other medical specialities. Much of this is due to ours being a cognitive field where we think more than we do and to the payment incentive plan being designed to reward volume and procedures more so than medical decision thinking. […]
The Pay Gap for Women in Medicine
The now-infamous comment about the pay gap for women in medicine in the Dallas Medical Journal unfortunately represents a belief not as rare as one would hope. It is the belief that the gender pay gap in medicine is deserved. While I do agree that if one works fewer hours one should expect to be […]
What Can Infectious Disease Physicians Learn from Hospitalists?
I just returned from IDWeek in New Orleans where one of the running themes was on the future of the infectious disease specialty. In brainstorming what we could do differently one question revolved around what could infectious disease physicians learn from hospitalists who have become an attractive specialty in just two decades. The New England […]
Your Infectious Disease Physician is Probably a Democrat
Data compiled by researchers at Yale and publicized by the New York Times suggests that some medical specialities, including infectious disease, lean heavily Democratic, while others such as surgery, lean heavily Republican. Only 23% of the infectious disease physicians sampled were registered with the Republican party. I am not surprised. The report also suggests that the specialties […]