Events
How To Be A Great Patient: A Doctor’s Wish List
Given the state of our broken health care system, I feel like we doctors don’t have much right to ask our patients how to behave, since most of us are falling far short of how our patients would prefer we behaved. As a patient, you may feel rushed, unheard, and...
I’m Putting On My White Coat – AGAIN
I’ve tried to leave medicine at least a dozen times. Medicine and I are like that couple that keeps breaking up and getting back together again, the ones you’re sure are done this time, only they kiss and make up and ultimately wind up engaged, leaving you partly...
Dedicated To The Outsiders
I was cleaning out my storage unit and came across the book of poems I wrote as a young girl - the book a publisher wanted to publish back when I was 15. (I politely declined - these were my private poems and not meant for public viewing.) This poem, which I wrote...
How To Protect Yourself From A Sleep Deprived Surgeon: An MD’s Thoughts On Being An Empowered Patient
As an OB/GYN physician who took overnight call for 15 years before leaving the practice of medicine, the CNN article about the latest editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, which discusses how sleep-deprived surgeons should consider disclosing their sleepy...
A Love Letter To Doctors
I have a confession to make. Four years ago, I was calling you the “Pod People,” because I felt so traumatized by the behavior of other doctors. When I quit practicing medicine around that time, I wanted to have nothing to do with doctors. I called myself a...
Things You Don’t Tell Your Doctor (But Should)
How many times have you filled out the form at the doctor’s office and lied? Everyone raise their hands (Bueller? Bueller?). Yeah, me too. And I’m a doctor. Why do we do this? Hey, there are some very personal questions on these forms! And you want your doctor to...