Search results for: music
Incidental Illness
How, in the quiet world of outpatient medicine, does one know when a life is saved? More
NYU Stories review of “What Doctors Feel”
A rare glimpse into the effects of shuttling from patient to patient without being allowed to process the powerful feelings—fear, anger, grief—that naturally arise when lives are at stake. More
Creativity in Medicine
“What are you doing creatively these days?” It’s not a question you hear commonly. Medicine is a field with a strong history of creativity, but its daily practice feels less and less creative More
Doctors Have Feelings Too
Doctors should be aware of emotions that may lead them to be less than honest with patients or reluctant to admit errors. More
Maladies, Remedies, and Anthologies: Medicine Taken at Its Word
The urge to anthologize seems to be one of those primordial drives, nestled in our genomes alongside the compulsions to eat heartily, imbibe lustily, and slaughter enemies willfully. Or at least that’s how the Greeks appear to have experienced it. 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
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
Fascinating Tapestry – “Medicine in Translation”
Story Circle Book Reviews 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 … More
The Pastor’s Son
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 were spidered with crimson streaks. He was probably a fellow university student, but not in the civil engineering department. Samuel didn’t recognize him. More
At Bellevue, a hospital reflects a changing world
Though city hospitals invoke images of charity patients and substandard, last-resort medical care, the reality is quite different. More
Dance and Medicine
It was on a desolate winter evening that I escaped from Bellevue. I plunged the last IV of my day into someone’s vein and then hopped on an M-15 bus uptown, pressing my subway token into the slot with both anxiety and relief. I was in the second year of my internal medicine residency training, the middle year, which is marked by what is charitably called a “dip†in motivation. More accurately, it is a pit, a chasm, an abyss, a Stygian marsh. More
Let Me Down Easy–Anna Deveare Smith
Every illness is unique, and every person faces illness in his or her own way. Anna Deveare Smith, in her one-woman show “Let Me Down Easy,†slips into the persona of twenty-one individuals who have faced an aspect of illness or death. In ninety minutes, Deveare Smith takes the audience on an existential scavenger hunt, … More
Cold Souls–Movie Review
“How does the medical profession treat the patient with pains of the soul? Traditionally, we offer psychotherapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, sometimes a condescending pat on the shoulder. But what if we could extirpate the root-cause pathology? Just as we resect a melanoma, drain an abscess, excise an inflamed gallbladder, why couldn’t the medical profession simply extract the angst-ridden soul?…” More
Part-Time Medicine
At times, being a part-time doctor feels like I’m somehow shirking the Hippocratic Oath: I’m not there for my patients all the time like a doctor should. During my “on†days, I work furiously like all of my colleagues. But on my “off†days, I am officially off. More
NEJM review of “Incidental Findings”
Ofri reminds us that medicine is really about the bond between a patient and a physician. “Incidental Findings” is a beautiful book. Ofri has enough faith in her patients, her profession, and herself to tell it all. More
