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When Patients Attack Doctors And Nurses

With the attention rightly focused on patient safety, what about healthcare workers? It’s somewhat of a hidden phenomenon, but attacks on doctors and nurses are on the rise.

Rahul Parikh writes about this in a recent Slate piece. He cites data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which found “healthcare workers are twice as likely as those in other fields to experience an injury from a violent act at work, with nurses being the most common victims.”

In the article, Parikh goes on to detail an attack on a physician who initially refused to give his patient opioid pain medications. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*

The Wrong Way To Convince Employees To Get The Flu Shot

to inject or not to inject, that is the question

To inject or not to inject, that is the question

Last week I took my wife and children for our yearly family flu vaccination.  The one Elysa used to call her ‘flea shot.’  Lord knows we’ve had enough fleas; if that would work, I’d consider it.  But I digress.

The same day, I went to work and found that the employee health/infection control folks were offering H1N1 vaccines.  I was told that as long as I took it in the opposite arm, I could go ahead and have mine.  So, possessor of two punctured arms, I went back to work and felt fine.  In fact, that was four days ago and I still feel fine. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at edwinleap.com*

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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