Articles & Media
Review of “What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine”
“An essential book. Each chapter is like a journey into the hearts and minds of clinicians who are struggling with emotions triggered by the realities of medicine.” More
Incidental Finding?
A small adrenal mass was “incidentally noted†on my patient’s CT. But once the incidentaloma had been given life, so to speak, it was no longer incidental. We were now obliged to run some highly complicated — and expensive — lab tests. More
Medical Check-Ups: Waste of Time?
A new report concluded that general health checkups for adults did not help patients live longer or healthier lives. So is it time to scrap the annual medical check-up? More
Lab, Interrupted
All academic medical centers rest on a tripod — patient care, education and research. The effect of Hurricane Sandy on the third leg of that tripod — research — has gotten the least attention, partly because rescuing cell cultures just isn’t as dramatic as carrying an I.C.U. patient on a ventilator down flights of stairs in the dark. But, of course, there is an incontrovertible link between those cell cultures and that patient. More
Coming Home to Bellevue
There’s no place like home. That’s not a phrase people typically utter about their hospitals, but those were the words on everyone’s lips when we returned to Bellevue last week, after the hurricane-induced evacuation. More
When the Patient is “Noncompliant”
As soon as a patient is described as noncompliant, doctor shorthand for patients who don’t take their medication or follow medical recommendations, it’s as though a black mark is branded on the chart. More
Bellevue and the Hurricane
Hurricane Sandy forced the evacuation of Bellevue’s patients and precipitated a full closure of this legendary hospital, along with its sister hospitals–NYU and the Manhattan VA. More
Women Still Missing from Medicine’s Top Ranks
While women make up about half of all medical students and a third of academic faculty members, they are are still vastly underrepresented in leadership roles. Is it that the medical world remains biased against women? Or is it that the culture of the workplace — built around the needs of men for generations — simply remains that way? More
Mensches with MDs
All religions have weighed in on the thorny ethical controversy of when life begins. In the Jewish faith, however, there is consensus: the embryo is only viable once it graduates medical school. More
Mansion of Happiness
What do Milton Bradley’s Game of Life, breast pumps, Stuart Little, Karen Ann Quinlan and eugenics have in common? In Jill Lepore’s engaging new book, “The Mansion of Happiness,” they are the touchstones along the existential footpath of life. “A History of Life and Death” – as the subtitle has it – could easily be a plodding, exhaustive disquisition; Lepore is a professor of history, after all. But her alter ego is as a New Yorker staff writer, and so she develops each chapter with an essayistic contour, diving in at an unexpected angle and then weaving a narrative that may perambulate historically, geographically and contextually. Yet we always come out at the other end with a thoughtful sense of how our society has grappled with these foundational concepts. More
Imagine a World Without AIDS
The beginning of the end of AIDS? Could it really be?For those of us who did our medical training in the late ’80s and early ’90s, AIDS saturated our lives. The whole era had a medieval feel, with visceral suffering and human decimation all around. More
Falling into the Diagnostic Trap
It’s as though our brains close ranks around our first impression, then refuse to consider anything else. With this patient, we almost missed a life-threatening diagnosis. More
Assuming the Doctor’s a “He”
A classic study of preschoolers in 1979 showed that even young children “knew†that doctors were men and nurses were women. But surely we’ve moved beyond these stereotypes, no? More
Ins and Outs of Inpatient and Outpatient Medicine
The inpatient wards and the outpatient clinic are part of the same hospital, but they are like different planets. On the inpatient side, the patients are acutely ill — malignant brain tumor, acute renal failure, heart valve infections, intestinal bleeding, and so on. Not so in the outpatient clinic, where patients get their regular medical care to manage everyday chronic illnesses like diabetes, hypertension, obesity and heart disease. More
Monday
Maybe it was simply human nature that no one wanted to be sick on weekends. Or admit to it. Or do something about it. Whatever the reason, Mondays were always the days of reckoning: weekend walls of denial came crashing down, weekend indiscretions faced their due, weekend warriors paid their price in blood. Admissions poured into the hospital. It was as though the map of Brooklyn had been curled up like a cone and all the human wreckage and misery funneled down to the tip where East Memorial Municipal Hospital sat, as it had for the past century since it opened, with its doors flung widely and indiscriminately open. More
