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Latest Posts

Saying No To Patients Can Make Doctors Very Unpopular

This is my column in EM News for the month of January.  Sometimes, being a physician means saying no and being disliked.  It’s not a popularity contest!  It’s about doing the right thing.

Most of us went into medicine because, in addition to being good students, we wanted to help people. How many oceans of ink and forests of paper have been used explaining that point to admissions committees we’ll never know. Suffice it to say, it felt very good when our professors wrote us glowing letters of recommendation. Of course, we were also saying, “I want to feel good about helping people. I want the recognition associated with the act of helping!” Premedical students, medical students, and physicians tend to be those people who desire accolades and who are naturally well-suited to attaining them. Read more »

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

Just To Be Sure: The Most Expensive Phrase In Medicine

Kevin, MD linked to this, and I really must comment.

Here’s the abstract, and I hope you’ll read it all:

200910290120.jpg For years I’ve heard friends describe experiences of being caught in a web of excessive and unnecessary medical testing. Their doctors ordered test Z to investigate a seemingly incidental finding on test Y, which had come about because of a borderline abnormality on test X.

I often wondered why test X was done in the first place. As a primary care physician, I would have treated them for the likely diagnosis and done diagnostic tests — especially a series of diagnostic tests — only if they didn’t respond as expected…. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*

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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