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The Story Of One Medical Professional’s Lack Of Compassion

It affected me.  Not just it, but the fact that it didn’t seem to affect my colleague.

I was a lowly fourth year medical student, delivering babies for all I was worth. Looking back, I realize I enjoyed it. The whole ‘joy of a baby coming into the world’ really gave me joy that a baby was coming into the world. Call me sentimental but I saw each birth as beautiful. Somehow I could look past the meconeum and the amniotic fluid and the episiotomies and see what was actually going on. It was a happy time for the mother (mostly). It was the beginning of hopes and dreams. It was a new start for the baby (obviously) and for the mother, and in a sense, each new birth may have signified a potential new start for me.
She was excited about her new baby, but there was a cloud over her entire admission. The reason she had come in to the hospital was because she hadn’t felt the baby kicking for the last 24 hours and she was worried. Quite soon we were worried, too. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at other things amanzi*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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