"Bitter winds churned up First Avenue and tore through the pathetically thin scrubs that Bellevue doled out to its interns. The December sky glowered the same leaden-green color of the bile that Dr. Kamal Singh was siphoning from the gut of Mr. Bill Porter, a homeless alcoholic with a Southern accent, a jauntily curled mustache…
Status quo is a powerful determinant of both belief and behavior. Many of the things we do and the things we believe in transpire because they are what we have always done or believed. This is why incumbents win elections, why we always choose the same flavor of yogurt, why we take the same route…
“One-dollar roses?” She says it with a slight inflection at the end, so that it sounds like a question. “One-dollar roses?” There is a waif-like tenderness to her throaty voice. Is she a shrewd businesswoman, or is that just the way she speaks? Either way, you can’t help but look at her. It would be…
by Danielle Ofri ©Beacon Press, 2009 Note: ” “Merced” first appeared in The Missouri Review, then in Best American Essays, 2002, and then in Danielle’s book Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue. “This is a case of a 23 year-old Hispanic female, without significant past medical history, who presented to Bellevue Hospital complaining of…
8:30 a.m. Doing intakes—interviews with new patients to the clinic. First one is Carola Castaña, a petite thirty-five-year-old Brazilian who immigrated to the United States three months ago. She folds her hands in her lap as I begin to take her history. She understands my questions better if I ask in Spanish rather than English,…
Sometimes it feels as though my brain is juggling so many competing details, that one stray request from a patient—even one that is quite relevant—might send the delicately balanced three-ring circus tumbling down. One day, I tried to work out how many details a doctor needs to keep spinning in her head in order to…
9 a.m.: "Doctora, it's Señora H. I'm at the walk-in clinic, but they say I will get whichever doctor is available. I'd rather see you." 10 a.m.: "Doctora, por favor, call me." 11 a.m.: "It's Señora H. I don't want to wait at walk-in." Noon: "I don't want to see another doctor. Only you. Call…
The sun was already setting on Thursday when Diallo Amadou called me. “I not feeling well,” he said. “I need to see you, Dr. Ofri.” I already had one foot out of the clinic door, and I knew that Mr. Amadou lived 45 minutes away. The whine in his voice was apparent even through his…
As a primary care internist, I spend a lot of time focusing on preventative health. There are all sorts of screening tests—mammograms, colonoscopies, PSA tests—but none of these actually “prevents” disease. They are designed to find disease at an early stage, allowing treatment that, ideally, avoids the more aggressive forms of the disease. The only…
The patient was a classic “worried-well” type of patient. When she unfolded a sheet of paper with a brisk snap, my heart sank as I saw 30 lines of hand-printed concerns.
A prescription for writing in medicine by Danielle Ofri Writing has always been a prominent part of medicine. Doctors write “histories” of their patients all the time—brief for ordinary office visits, extensive for admissions to the hospital. Some medical schools use creative writing to help students gain empathy and insight. There are doctors who write…
“Dr. Chan and Mrs. Geng eased out of their chairs in the waiting room using their matching wooden canes, the kind distributed by the hospital, free of charge. At 89, Dr. Chan was stooped and frail, his body paper-thin. He seemed as though he might topple over from the breeze generated by the opening and…
The Debilitated Muse: Poetry in the Face of Illness by Danielle Ofri Journal of Medical Humanities (2010) 31:303–317 Abstract Poetry is a supremely sensory art, both in the imagining and in the writing. What happens when the poet faces illness? How is the poetry affected by alterations of the body and mind? This paper examines…
Mammograms: One doctor, her patients, herself by Danielle Ofri CNN.com *Monday: Our journal club at the hospital reviewed the recent Norwegian trial showing limited benefits of mammograms. *Tuesday: I had my appointment for my own mammogram. *Wednesday: Veneta Masson’s article titled “Why I Don’t Get Mammograms” appeared in Health Affairs magazine. There’s been a lot…
Danielle’s lecture on multiculturalism in medicine–”Journeys With Our Patients.” (Filmed at UVA Medical Center. 9/29/10) Share on Facebook Share on Linkedin Share on Twitter Tell a friend
by Danielle Ofri CNN.com George Bush once famously (or infamously) commented that health care is indeed available for all: You just go to the emergency room. Unfortunately, this is a reality for a significant swath of the American people, and the problem continues to worsen. A report in the September issue of Health Affairs points…
There’s a lot we can learn from animals in many facets of life — Lord knows, a nice massage behind the ears could do a lot of us some good — but I am consistently impressed by how much smoother veterinary medicine runs.
by Danielle Ofri CNN.com What exactly is the mission of a medical school? Is it to train the best and smartest doctors? Is to tend to our nation’s health? Is it to further medical knowledge? Go to the website of just about any medical school and you will see roughly the same “three-pillars” message from…
A dispassionate discourse on the abortion wars in America? Not something that seems possible, at least in the current polarized culture in the United States. Almost by definition, any analysis of the politics and practice of abortion is heavily partisan. Even the medical world—the last bastion of any possible objectivity— has been overlaid with politics.…
by Danielle Ofri It was a hot July afternoon when I found myself in a quiet hospital lounge, having “the family discussion” with a patient newly admitted to my medical service, a sweet middle-aged woman whose lung cancer had spread so extensively that it now encircled the vital vessels of her chest. The “family discussion”…
Could ‘runner’s high’ chemical help curb overeating? by Danielle Ofri CNN.com As a primary care internist, my practice spans the common adult ailments—diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, coronary artery disease, arthritis. It is hard not to avoid the difficult truth that obesity, while perhaps not causing all of these illness, certainly exacerbates them greatly. With my…
What does your doctor hear when you talk? by Danielle Ofri published on CNN.com Whenever a patient asks me about the side effects of a particular medication, I point to the very long roster of symptoms listed for the drug. “It’s anything any patient has ever experienced,” I say, then try to help prioritize the…
Quality measures are all the rage now. Insurance companies and HMOs love them because they see them as ways to save money. Hospitals and medical organizations are flocking to them because they are an appealing way to measure and possibly improve medical care. The zeitgeist of “pay for performance” is in the air, and quality…
Ashamed To Admit It: Owning Up To Medical Error By DANIELLE OFRI, M.D. Health Affairs Journal (also in The Washington Post). Precisely two weeks after completing my medical internship,I proceeded to nearly kill a patient. July marked the startof my second year of residency at New York City’s BellevueHospital, and it was my first time…
When Unemployed Means Unhealthy Too. By DANIELLE OFRI, M.D. New York Times “I used to have a doctor,” she said, matter-of-factly, “but when I got laid off six months ago I lost my insurance.” Ms. C. shifted in her chair while I took notes during our first medical visit. “So I didn’t do anything about…
I had to be honest—I was uncomfortable with my new patient, a woman in her late thirties, in my office for a general medical check-up. Ms. M. was petite in stature, but wide in girth, a medical condition we’d term “morbid obesity.” Her face was entirely swallowed up in thick fleshy layers of neck and…
How many hours can a doctor work? The residency regulators are back. About ten years ago, the national organization that accredits residency programs (ACGME) set out its first guidelines about how many hours a doctor-in-training can work. Interns and residents finally achieved the vaunted 80-hour workweek. (New York State was 15 years ahead on this,…
“The threads of Danielle Ofri’s memoir, Medicine in Translation, come together in a fascinating tapestry, with shimmers of what it is to be a physician, a mother, a writer and musician, a person with opinions trying to open herself to a world full of differences. She writes well, and the stories she weaves here are…
Review of “Medicine in Translation” by writer/blogger Elaine Zimbel. “In person Dr. Danielle Ofri is an impressive woman with a healthy respect for the doctor/patient relationship. She was guest speaker at a McGill University seminar entitled “Singular Intimacies: literature as a bridge between doctor and patient”, a topic which particularly interested me since I had…
Read the first chapter of “Medicine in Translation” in the medical humanities journal Hektoen International. “There was a sharp rap at the apartment door. When Samuel Chuks Nwanko opened it, he saw a young man standing in the hallway wearing a stained denim jacket over a University of Nigeria T-shirt. The whites of his eyes…
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