doctor-patient relationship

A Sampler of Danielle’s writing

Want to sample Danielle’s writing? Check out videos, podcasts, and of course, the written word of Danielle’s most memorable stories. More

Filling the Ritalin Rx

Most physicians think little about prescriptions after they hand them off to their patients. But patients can face shame and humiliation when filling a prescription. More

Why Would Anyone Become a Doctor?

The awe of discovering the human body. The honor of being trusted to give advice. The gratitude for helping someone through a difficult illness. These things never grow old. More

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

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

For Whom Do We Write

Was writing simply cathartic, an unloading of pent-up frustration, pain, occasional exhilaration? Or was this part of a nobler cause, something that would fall under the purview of healing, something with ultimate benefit for my patients? For if it wasn’t the latter, was I not simply exploiting my patients for their readily accessible drama? More

Medicine Out of Context

I ducked into the ladies’ room at La Guardia Airport in New York for a pitstop before boarding my flight. Inside I encountered a housekeeper washing the floors. She flashed me a broad smile.

“Doctora,” she said, and then hesitated. I could see that she was waiting for a response. “Recuerdame?” 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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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

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

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

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