In a recent talk I gave for colleagues, I ventured outside the box. I searched for a metaphor to make cancer treatments easy to understand. Around the same time, it so happened my kids decided we needed to re-watch all of The Avengers movies at home. (in order – of course). Here’s where you get…
Comments closedHappy week of International Women’s Day 2019 (IWD2019)! In the spirit of this year’s IWD2019 theme, #BalanceforBetter, I pulled together this collection of posts from and about women in medicine. I hope you will draw inspiration from them for your own lives and practices. 1. Being a Woman, by Dr. Anne Malatt An uplifting reflection…
Comments closedIn celebration of Valentine’s Day this week, it seemed fitting to put together a post on the concept of love in medicine. Only…there’s not many of us out there writing on the topic. After a google search of “love in medicine” and “love and doctoring”, I found the following three posts, and have included one…
Comments closedThere are small moments of reflection that pop up in any given day that can affect how we approach our practice of medicine. Something at home affecting us at work, or vice versa. Like a Venn diagram, the two circles overlapping by just that slight amount at the center. One such recent intersection for me…
Comments closedWhen I first turned to writing as a method to cope with the stresses of my practice, I had no knowledge of the field of narrative medicine. In fact, I had been through 4 years of medical school, 3 years of residency, 3 years of subspecialty fellowship, and over a decade in the practice of…
Comments closedAs 2018 draws to a close, I want to end on a hopeful note. In this post I share how the era of immunotherapy, specifically immune-checkpoint-inhibitors, has changed the landscape of community oncology practice, by significantly extending survival rates in stage 4 (metastatic) non-small-cell lung cancer. I want to tell you the story of Joe.…
2 Commentsupdate 9/30/2019 – Honorable mention, Online/Print Article, Writer’s Digest 88th Annual Writing Competition! I recently came across an eye-opening passage on gender bias by the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The excerpt from her book is as follows: Theresa May is the British prime minister and here is how a progressive British newspaper described her husband:…
2 CommentsAn oncologist colleague once said to me at a funeral, “People assume that as oncologists, we understand more about death than other people. But we really don’t.” He then faced a church filled with mourners and delivered a heartrending eulogy. I’ve thought of his words often since. Every time I counsel a patient and family…
Comments closedIs the duty of the physician to capture the patient stories, or capture a billing code? In July 2018, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed revamping Medicare payments for office visits. CMS plans to collapse Medicare fees for levels 2 through 5 office visits into a single price beginning in 2019, as…
Comments closedHello Readers. This week I am pleased to share a link to my latest narrative essay that I am privileged to have published in JAMA, in their popular “A Piece of My Mind” series. Entitled Making Room, it is a very personal piece for me, in which I have tried to write about doctor work life balance,…
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