Danielle Ofri
Chaperones for Patients?
The airline passenger who refused to allow a security pat-down made national headlines quickly. The idea of a stranger touching a person’s intimate areas makes most people cringe. But something like this occurs every day in the doctor’s office. More
Gifts of the Magi: For a young doctor far from home, an unexpected present
“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 and a battered walking stick. His skin was sallow and his eyes jaundiced. He squinted at Dr. Singh. ”Thought they weren’t giving visas to Arabs these days,” he rasped.
Dr. Singh controlled his temper. “Mr. Porter, we don’t discriminate here against doctors or against patients.” He sighed. “And I’m Sikh.” He pointed to his indigo turban for good measure, but how would a redneck bigot from Texas know Sikhism from Buddhism from vegetarianism?…” More
Merced
“This is a case of a 23 year-old Hispanic female…†The speaker droned on with the details of the case that I knew so well. I leaned back in my chair, anticipating and savoring the accolades that were going to come. After all, in a roundabout way, I’d made the diagnosis. I was the one who had the idea to send the Lyme test in the first place. More
A Day in the Clinic
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, but her Portuguese replies are Greek to me, so she struggles to answer in English. More
Neuron Overload
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 do a satisfactory job, by calculating how many thoughts I have to juggle in a typical office visit. More
Voice Mail: Blessing and Curse
Voice mail is both a blessing and a curse. When we were first given voice mail in our clinic, it was a revolution–patients could actually get in contact with their doctors. But sometimes voice mail is a ball and chain. More
The Emotional Epidemiology of Vaccination
The only preventative medicine that actually prevents disease are vaccinations. Our world is an immeasurably better place since the advent of vaccines. Yet there is a complicated psychology that hovers like a fog around the idea of vaccination. More
Drowning in a Sea of Health Complaints
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. More
Rx: Writing
Writing has always been a prominent part of medicine. Doctors write “histories†of their patients all the time. Increasingly there has been interest in writing by patients. More
Meet Dr. Chan….
“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 … More
The Debilitated Muse
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. More
More on Mammograms
A monolithic message on mammogram screening for breast cancer sidesteps critical nuances. More
Multiculturalism Lecture
Danielle’s lecture on multiculturalism in medicine–“Journeys With Our Patients.” More
ERs for Primary Care
George Bush once famously (or infamously) commented that health care is indeed available for all: You just go to the emergency room. More
A Tale of Two Phone Calls
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. More
