emotions
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
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
Doc, How Much Time I Got?
There are few situations more horrible than having to tell another human being that he or she is going to die. And it doesn’t get any easier with experience… More
Remembering 9/11
On 9/11, doctors and nurses swarmed Bellevue Hospital, ready to help the injured from the twin towers. But we weren’t ready for happened next. More
A “Difficult” Patient’s Journey
Chloë Atkins is the type of patient that every doctor dreads—presenting with a plethora of symptoms that don’t offer any obvious medical explanation. There are multitudes of such patients in a general practitioner’s roster and most, thankfully, will not turn out to have a serious illness. But there are a few who do, and as Atkins’ book points out, this can be a harrowing experience. 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
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
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
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
Owning Up to Medical Error
Precisely two weeks after completing my medical internship,I proceeded to nearly kill a patient. July marked the startof my second year of residency at New York City’s BellevueHospital, and it was my first time being fully in charge of a patient. More
Sometimes, Doctors Find Answers Far Off the Charts
Sometimes it is only when the patient is halfway out the door that the important information spills out. The “hand on the doorknob” phenomenon is well known in medicine. More
People, Panic, and Pandemics
The fact that a half-a-million people die each year from filariasis, Guinea worm, and onchocerciasis elicits little more than a yawn. But diseases like Ebola and swine flu had us riveted: horrific pathogens from the primordial African or Asian muck could migrate to infect the innocent Western world. Sounds like a thriller movie. Which it was. Outbreak, in 1995, grossed more money than the budget for most health departments. More
