The Conversation Placebo
Pain remedies developed by the pharmaceutical industry are only modestly effective, and they have side effects that range from nausea and constipation to addiction and death. What’s often overlooked is that the simple conversation between doctor and patient can be as potent an analgesic as many treatments we prescribe. More
Should Doctors Treat Trump Anxiety?
Doctors deal with side effects all the time—side effects of medications, side effects of diseases, side effects of treatments. But side effects of an election is new territory for us. We can report medication side effects to the FDA, but to whom do we report election side effects? More
Podcast: Listen to the Patient!
Danielle is interviewed by Joe Elia from the New England Journal of Medicine about her new book, “What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear.” More
Poetry in Medicine
When I make rounds with medical students and interns, I’ve often tried to sneak in a poem at the end. It’s not always the most well-received bit of medical teaching, More
The Insanity of Recertification
Studying for the boards is like stuffing your face at a hot dog–eating contest: The first few hundred pages are intriguing and tasty; the next few hundred are interesting, but your brain is feeling sluggish. The remaining thousand pages are just confettied sauerkraut delivered by dump-truck onto a comatose slop of neurons. More
Just a “Regular” Doctor
“What’s your specialty?” This question continually flummoxes me. This is the moment that I experience a brief surge of envy toward my cardiology and dermatology colleagues who have simple one-word answers to this question that any lay person can understand. More
The Doctor-Patient Relationship is Alive and Well
Medicine is unquestionably harder than it was 10 years ago. Many more doctors I know talk about quitting (an option that is not equally available to patients). However, there’s been no mass exodus of doctors. We doctors grumble loudly — often with good cause — but we aren’t quitting in droves, mainly because of patients like Ms. M. More
Why Does the Physical Exam Stop at the Navel?
It’s like our patients are Humpty Dumpty, and the pieces are divvied out between different medical fields. Can we put the patient back together again? More
“Literature about medicine may be all that can save us”
“Language, that most human invention,” wrote Oliver Sacks, “can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.” In the last decade or two, a new generation of doctor writers – including Atul Gawande, Abraham Verghese, Henry Marsh,Danielle Ofri, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Paul Kalanithi and Gavin Francis – have undertaken the mission of seeing in this fashion. More
Should Doctors Care About Happiness?
We in the health care professions need to notice and inquire about happiness the same way we do other aspects of our patients’ lives. More
A Doctor in the Neighborhood
There aren’t any ethical guidelines about where a doctor should live or how she should behave when she and her patient are in line at the grocery store. More
Patients, and Doctors, Aren’t Dying at Home
Doctors, it turns out, aren’t much different than everyone else when it comes to where they die. More
The “Mall-ification” of Health Care
Retail health clinics have exploded over the last 10 years, and now it seems like every other big box store, supermarket and shopping mall has its own clinic. More
Getting the Diagnosis Wrong
Diagnostic accuracy is fiendishly difficult to measure precisely. A new report suggests that nearly everyone will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetimes. More
Getting the Diagnosis Right
If I had the luxury of an hour with each patient, I would have the time to carefully sort through every diagnostic possibility. But the reality is that I, like most doctors, have five to 10 minutes to push the majority of diagnoses to the bottom of the list, come up with the most likely few at the top. More
