My alarm goes off at 3:30 AM for some early charting. I love these pre-work hours on my own unpaid time. I went into debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars to have the human physical need for sleep trained out of me. A neat side effect of this is that it also wiped the…
An April 28 article in JAMA Internal Medicine, “Comparing Physician and Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Responses to Patient Questions Posted to a Public Social Media Forum,” generated a great deal of discussion — much of it horrified. In particular, people are focusing on the study’s conclusions: that “chatbot responses were longer than physician responses, and the study’s…
Comments closedAbout five years ago, I did the first public reading of my non-academic writing. I was a 40-something-year-old physician, and I was terrified. It was at a narrative medicine event, and I’d been selected to read one of my personal essays. A few days earlier, an experienced performer had given me some pointers. Identified which…
Comments closedIt is 4:15 p.m. in my clinic, and I’m running an hour behind. One of my morning patients arrived acutely ill and thus required more of my time and attention than the schedule allotted for. Accordingly, every patient after that has ended up waiting for me. And, as I’m a cancer physician, each of them…
Comments closedAs a cancer physician, the amount of data I obtain on my patients is ever-increasing, along with options for cancer therapies. This is, as the saying goes, a good problem to have, but the amount of data management oncologists must do after hours (because there isn’t enough time in the clinic day) to keep up…
Comments closedThis weekend, after seeing others on social media post images from openAI’s DALL-E-2 art generator, I decided to give it a try. After thinking on a topic that (1) I am interested in, (2) others are interested in, and (3) I was curious to see an AI’s ability to interpret, I decided on the topic…
Comments closedMy patient is older and hard of hearing, and masks aren’t helping the situation. I raise my voice so he can hear me, which means I lose a lot of nuance and expression in my tone. Within a few minutes, he allows his mask to droop below his nose, as if trying to show me…
Comments closedOriginally published on Medscape Blogs on June 8, 2022 Last week, after the multiple recent tragedies in our nation, I found myself turning to my laptop to write the feelings that were too big. But instead of my usual prose essay form, what came out was a poem. I also had been thinking a lot…
Comments closedSome years ago, I noted a trend in my practice. More and more patients requested to switch their care to me for a single reason: They wanted a doctor who would answer their emails. To my surprise, that was how I learned some of the other doctors — all male — in the practice did…
Comments closedI have a secret. It’s one I think many physicians and nurses share. Sometimes, when I’m stretched too thin — overbooked, hungry, tired, fielding yet another appeal to an insurance company in the middle of a clinic day — I find myself momentarily resenting the patients on my schedule. As soon as this happens, I…
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