Stereotyping Patients and their Ailments
Mr. S received the unwelcome news that he was H.I.V. positive, though his T-cell count was still in the normal range. His T-cell count stayed high enough to protect him from opportunistic infections. He seemed to be one of the rare, lucky “nonprogressors.†But after several years of consistently robust T-cell counts, one of the nurse practitioners had a hunch. More
Lives Cut Short by Depression
There is something about a first friend that is irreplaceable. No matter how disparately your lives travel, the first friend you ever had occupies a special place in your heart. I was lucky that Michael was considerate enough to be born four months before me, waiting next door, ready to join me in elaborate childhood games of hide-and-seek, multilevel couch forts and family camping trips in the Catskills. More
Doctors and the D Word….
I could understand why other people might prefer euphemisms for death, but why medical professionals? Weren’t we supposed to be much more comfortable with the workings of the human body? Didn’t we pride ourselves on our technical accuracy? Didn’t we say “umbilicus†instead of “belly button� More
Health and Luck of the Draw
We imagine medicine as a rational science, and we imagine our attention to our lives and our bodies pays off in reasonably predictable ways. But I have to admit that random, irrational, unplanned events can often have greater effects on overall health. More
Doctors on Facebook
For doctors who have waded into social media, however gingerly, many questions arise. Is posting a medical musing or details of a recent party on Twitter or Facebook the same as chatting with colleagues while walking down the hall of the hospital? Do the same rules of etiquette and liability apply to this extremely public environment? More
Doctor at the Funeral
Death is a given in medicine. That truism, though, doesn’t offer much comfort when it’s your patient who has died. I was in clinic the other day, showing the ropes to a fresh-faced medical student, when a nurse leaned toward me and whispered that L.W. had died over the holiday weekend.
It was like a sucker-punch in the gut, the raw rope of grief lashing out unexpectedly. More
The Doctor vs The Computer
While I’ve been typing, the character number has been counting backward from 1,000, and now I’ve hit zero. The computer will not permit me to say anything more about my patient.
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Patient 1, Society 0
A young, healthy patient called me recently requesting a CT scan of his head because of his headaches. He described his symptoms, and they sounded to me like migraines. His clinical picture was not suggestive of a brain tumor and I told him so, but he was persistent. “What if I’m the one 35-year-old who drops dead of a brain tumor while you try to figure out what’s wrong?†he asked. More
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
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
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
When Unemployed Means Unhealthy Too
Research confirms what physicians observe and what everyone seems to know in their gut: losing a job is bad for our health. Our crazy patchwork system that ties health insurance to our jobs means that the recession–and it’s “jobless recovery”–are damaging our nation’s health. More
A Patient, a Death, but No One to Grieve
What if a patient dies and nobody is there to mourn? Is it like a tree falling silently in the forest? More
Scenes From the Lives They Lived in the City
”Nine P.M.,” somebody shouted. ”Rikers bus rollin’ in!” I stepped out of the Bellevue E.R. into the chilly spring night to see what the excitement was. Just pulling in was a school bus, the kind I’d taken every day in elementary school… More
