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Tag: women in medicine

It is literally impossible to be a woman in medicine

A monologue in the style of America Ferrera’s character Gloria in the Barbie Movie (original script by Greta Gerwig). It is literally impossible to be a woman in medicine. You can be at the top of your class in medical school and residency, and yet you will never think you’re good enough. Like, we have to…

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Having it All? How Men can Manage a Career in Medicine and Fatherhood: A Satire

Author’s note: The Amazon Prime show The Power, based on Naomi Alderman’s book, flips the gender power construct 180 degrees. By doing so, the show (and book) show us how when certain things happen to men, they become shocking and unbelievable. Whereas for women, it’s just our day-to-day lives. I wrote this piece as an…

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2022 Roundup: Top 5 most read blog posts of 2022 — and my top 5 favorites

I haven’t done one of these year-end round-ups before, but given 2022 marked the five year anniversary of the blog, it seemed a good year to start. For each post, I’ve selected a favorite passage to highlight (different from the preview passage you’ll see on the home page). First, the top five most read blog…

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Under the Surface, an Oncologist’s Reflection on the Movie Encanto

(Warning: This blog post contains minor spoilers for the Disney movie Encanto ) There I was. In a movie theater for the first time in almost 2 years. The occasion: to celebrate my youngest child attaining full vaccine immunity (2 weeks out from the second Pfizer vaccine). We wore our N95 masks and skipped the popcorn. One…

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Dear Patient: An Open Letter on Why I’ve Been Working Part-time During the Pandemic

Dear Patient, I heard you were asking my staff about what I do all day when I’m not in the clinic and why I work part-time. This is an important question and one I’d like to answer. When I’m not in the clinic, I see my vaccinated teens off to school each weekday morning. Then,…

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Serious Hair

If you want to be taken seriously, you have to have serious hair. That line has lived in my brain since 1988. I was fifteen years old, and I was convinced Melanie Griffith’s character in Working Girl had revealed one of life’s secret truths. In the movie, she utters the line as she directs her…

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Don’t Call Me Lucky: on female physicians’ experiences of gender bias from patients

update 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:…

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