Medical oncologists often find ourselves needing to advise people who do not look or feel sick to take chemotherapy. This concept, of course, is what we call adjuvant therapy — using chemotherapy in healthy people as an adjunct to surgery to increase the cure rate from surgery alone. I’ve been thinking about the concept of…
Comments closed(on why anyone would choose to be an oncologist) Oncologists are often asked our motivation for entering the specialty. My standard response is to smile, and state that I followed a calling. But to explain that calling is a longer story that I’ve never shared. Twenty years later, here is my first attempt to do…
Comments closedupdate 11/2020: recipient of an Honorable Mention Award in the 2020 Writer’s Digest Writing Competition (print/online article category)! My patient is middle-aged, morbidly obese, with undiagnosed (until now) alcoholic cirrhosis, and a vaguely documented history of cardiac disease—per the chart “noncompliant” with medications. “Noncompliant” in this case turns out to mean he had no insurance…
Comments closedIn the transcendent memoir “In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope” pulmonary/critical care physician Rana Awdish is seven months pregnant when she develops sudden onset of excruciating abdominal pain. She senses that the problem is not obstetrical, but something else — something visceral. But instead of being whisked…
2 CommentsBellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital Bellevue. What images does the title bring to your mind? Ten Days in a Mad-House? Perhaps the most famous — and infamous — hospital in the United States. In this well-paced, engrossing history and biography of the storied institution, David Oshinsky lays out…
Comments closedA curated list of top 5 articles on physician burnout for the week of October 1, 2019, with a theme: the EHR.
Comments closedA weekly roundup of selected articles on physician burnout, for the week of September 15, 2019.
Comments closedGuest Post by Dr. Rajeev Kurapati Burnout among medical professionals is an epidemic, and it’s impacting nearly every aspect of healthcare. For oncologists and practitioners working with cancer patients or other patients navigating difficult or terminal diseases, burnout can be especially insidious. One reason burnout can be so insidious is that even many medical professionals…
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Spoiler Alert: Contains minor spoilers for the memoir “Educated” by Tara Westover “You seem very angry,” I say to my patient. It’s a basic technique in our physician tool chest, but I’d forgotten to try it—reflection. He hesitates. Surprise crosses his face. “I am,” he says. “But not at you.” I allow the space of…
Comments closedGuest post by Leah Walsh In this guest post, author Leah Walsh explains what it means if you are one of the 20% of the human population to have a personality trait now established as “highly sensitive”, and how that might affect you if you work in a caregiving profession. Be sure to read through…
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