Why this physician quit her job
So last week, I did the bravest thing I have done in a very long time — I quit my job. Yes, I put in my 60-day notice. This was my dream job post service in the U.S. Air Force. I had dreamed of working in this establishment for months before my service time was up. I could not have been happier when I joined their team, a group practice enjoying every specialty I could ask or hope for. Coming from a private solo practice with little or no subspecialty support, then joining the U.S. Air Force, serving four years, and getting a taste of a “giant” practice with all kinds of specialties at your disposal, my current emplo...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - August 31, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: < a href="https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/uchenna-umeh" rel="tag" > Uchenna Umeh, MD < /a > Tags: Physician Pediatrics Practice Management Source Type: blogs
7 habits of highly effective interns
I remember the fervor of my first day of internship: expecting a daunting yet exciting time lay ahead and I was finally going to be of some use to people. (And to my parents, relatives, and neighbors: “Oh, you’re finally a doctor.”) I felt like Tom Cruise on the airstrip of Miramar racing an F-14 with Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone as he was about to join Top Gun.
However, these cinematic visuals soon came to a halt as I felt grossly unprepared for this new responsibility. I had to be adept with not only medical knowledge, but also the electronic health record (the labyrinth that never ended), assimilate pletho...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - August 27, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: < a href="https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/sam-kant" rel="tag" > Sam Kant, MD < /a > Tags: Education Hospital-Based Medicine Source Type: blogs
Show respect for how hard your interns and residents work
As we age, we look back and convince ourselves that we were better and worked harder than the current generation. Dr. Gurpreet Dhaliwal addressed this issue beautifully in an essay – The Great Generation
Today’s trainees are every bit as professional, motivated to learn, and devoted to their patients as previous generations. Students and residents follow duty hours but then log on from home to monitor their patients, write orders, and stay in touch with their on-call colleagues.7 They come to the hospital on their mandated days off for family meetings. They connect with their patients despite unprecedented paper...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - August 24, 2018 Category: Internal Medicine Authors: rcentor Tags: Attending Rounds Source Type: blogs
The focus of rounding
A wonderful senior resident helped me understand this goal of rounding. Rounds should focus primarily on understanding the key problems and the diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to those problems. She suggested that some rounds spend too much time on “minutia” that the resident could handle, and not enough on understanding the big issues. According to her, rounds work best when we spend our time addressing the problems that the patient has and increasing the learners’ understanding of those issues.
Her understanding of different rounding styles highlights a key question about rounds and graduate...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - August 23, 2018 Category: Internal Medicine Authors: rcentor Tags: Medical Rants Source Type: blogs
Talking it Like it is: Advice from a HPM Fellow to all the New Interns
by Christine BridgesThe hallways are full again after a short June reprieve. Starched white coats, cleaner than it ever seemed possible bustle through the hallways, making up in speed what they lack in direction. They fill each space with eager anticipation. It is almost palpable. It is the scent of July. Each furtive glance at the clipboard in the elevator fills me with longing to tell them the advice I wish had been passed out with my first pager.The biggest challenge ahead of you will be communication. Over the next 3-7 years more often than relieving tension pneumothoraxes, performing thoracenteses, or placing art line...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - August 22, 2018 Category: Palliative Care Tags: bridges communication intern residency The profession Source Type: blogs
Physicians can ’t take things personally. Here are some tips.
A natural part of life is emotionally growing (hopefully) with experience. If I was to look back at my own journey, when I was in medical school and just graduating, I would say that without doubt, one of the biggest things I would tell my younger self, would be to not take things too personally. This would be particularly true in professional situations.
I look back at how personally I used to take certain things that I no longer do — and have to smile to myself at my relative immaturity. I remember one incident in particular that happened several months after I finished medical school. I was seeing a 19-year-old p...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - August 22, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: < a href="https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/suneel-dhand" rel="tag" > Suneel Dhand, MD < /a > Tags: Physician Hospital-Based Medicine Primary Care Source Type: blogs
Results from the 2018 Libertarianism vs. Conservatism Post-Debate Survey
As part of a yearly summer tradition, the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute co-host a debate in which interns at both think tanks debate whether conservatism or libertarianism is a better ideology. Following this year’s debate, the Cato Institute conducted a post-debate survey of attendees to ask who they thought won the debate and what they believe about a variety of public policy and philosophical issues. The post-debate survey offers a unique opportunity to examine how young leaders in the conservative and libertarian movements approach deep philosophical questions that may be inaccessible to a general au...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - August 21, 2018 Category: American Health Authors: Emily Ekins Source Type: blogs
Why Hillarycare failed …and what we need to learn from that failure
By MATTHEW HOLT
In July 2005 George W Bush had relatively recently won a Presidential election in which the Republican won the popular vote (something that will likely never happen again) & the Republicans controlled all three branches of Government. Those of us liberals at the bottom of a dark trench were wondering if and how we’d get to health reform. So in another reprint to celebrate THCB’s 15th birthday, here was my then take on what went wrong in 1994 and what would happen next–Matthew Holt
There are lots of versions about what killed the 1993-4 health care reform effort. Hillary C...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 14, 2018 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Matthew Holt HillaryCare Source Type: blogs
Making the world a better place for new medical interns
It’s that time of year again.
The start of a new academic year, marked by the arrival of a brand-new class of interns starting out in their training.
Clutching their freshly-minted medical degrees, they appear so ready, so anxious, so excited, so eager to learn.
Now it’s our job to make sure they stay this way.
(Have I written this column before? Every year …)
Continue reading ...
Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage your online reputation: A social media guide. Find out how. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - August 13, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: < a href="https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/fred-n-pelzman" rel="tag" > Fred N. Pelzman, MD < /a > Tags: Education Hospital-Based Medicine Primary Care Source Type: blogs
New interns: Get ready to be fleeced
This one’s for the new interns.
You’re excited, you’re about to start residency. You’re a doctor. No more short white coat. You’ve got the long white coat that you’ve been waiting for. You’ve arrived.
But actually, there’s one more thing you need before you really feel like you look like a doctor. It might be a few months. There’s going to be a long process. Someone in your program, maybe the chief residents, are going to organize an online ordering bonanza. You’ll pay more than you ever thought you would for a jacket (or vest). But it’s so worth it. You’ll wait weeks for the custom embroidery. And ...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - August 11, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: < a href="https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/sharon-ostfeld-johns" rel="tag" > Sharon Ostfeld-Johns, MD < /a > Tags: Education Hospital-Based Medicine Residency Source Type: blogs
Ill-informed, Mission-Hostile Health Care Leadership... in the White House and the US Department of Health and Human Services
Introduction - What Has Gone Wrong with the Leadership of Health Care OrganizationsA major focus ofHealth Care Renewal has been problems in leadership and governance of health care organizations, which we believe became major causes of health care dysfunction. For example, we have discussed how leadership is oftenill-informed. More and more people leading non-profit, for-profit and government health care organizations have had no training or experience in actually caring for patients, or in biomedical, clinical or public health research as professional managers largely supplanted health care professionals as le...
Source: Health Care Renewal - August 5, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: conflicts of interest crime DHHS ill-informed management mission-hostile management narcotics White House Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, August 6th 2018
In this study, we analyzed FGF21 levels and alterations in the expression of genes encoding components of the FGF21-responsive molecular machinery in adipose tissue from aged individuals so as to ascertain whether altered FGF21 responsiveness that develops with aging jeopardizes human health and/or accelerates metabolic disturbances associated with aging.
We studied a cohort of 28 healthy elderly individuals (≥70 years) with no overt signs of metabolic or other pathologies and compared them with a cohort of 35 young healthy controls (≤40 years). Serum FGF21 levels were significantly increased in elderly individ...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 5, 2018 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Undoing Aging: Doug Ethell's Presentation on the Leucadia Therapeutics Approach to Treating Alzheimer's Disease
Doug Ethell has a clear and comparatively easily tested hypothesis on an important cause of Alzheimer's disease: that it results from the progressive failure of drainage of cerebrospinal fluid through one particularly crucial pathway in the skull. This traps ever greater levels of metabolic waste in the brain, such as amyloid-β, tau, and α-synuclein, and leads to the spectrum of well-known neurodegenerative diseases characterized by protein aggregates and resultant dysfunction and death of neurons.
Dave Gobel of the Methuselah Foundation backed the first work on this hypothesis a few years back, and the result is ...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 1, 2018 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Pakistan ’s Youth: An Untapped Resource by Pakistan’s Political Parties
The Pakistani public is headed to the polls on July 25, to vote in the third consecutive election since 2008. While it remains difficult to predict which political party will emerge victorious, one thing is clear: Pakistan ’s youth will most likely determine the winner.Pakistan is in the middle ofyouth bulge. According to Pakistan ’sNational Human Development Report, 64 percent of the population is between the ages of 15 and 29. This populationis concerned with completing their education, securing a job to increase the likelihood of financial stability, having the ability to change a job if needed (indicating a desire ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 24, 2018 Category: American Health Authors: Sahar Khan Source Type: blogs
A physician ’s mistakes as a rookie MD
July is upon us again: that New Year celebrated only by those in the medical field. A time when medical students begin as doctors, interns become residents, residents become fellows and, basically, everyone in every position is one year less experienced at it than the person who held that position the day before.
This July marks the end of my first year of pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship. Finally, after college, grad school, med school, residency, chief residency, fellowship number one, and now the beginning of fellowship number two, it is the end of my last first year of training. A time for gratefulness, sentime...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - July 19, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: < a href="https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/rebecca-e-macdonell-yilmaz" rel="tag" > Rebecca E. MacDonell-Yilmaz, MD, MPH < /a > Tags: Physician Hospital-Based Medicine Source Type: blogs
