medical training
M&M
The body wasn’t even cold when they informed me that I would be presenting the case at M & M. I had never killed anyone before, so I didn’t know what to expect. I mean I had been to M & M before, but never as victim. More
Trial and Error
When I look back at the trial-and-error method of my medical training, I’m frankly horrified at what was considered a routine approach to training—placing sharp objects and critical conversations in the hands of medical fetuses and letting them loose on living, breathing patients. The practice of medicine needn’t entail actual practicing on our patients More
Art & Anatomy
The “art of medicine†is a term that is used—sometimes disparagingly—to refer to the non-technical skills of medicine. Artistic rendering enables us to appreciate the emotional grappling one must do in the world of anatomy and in the larger world of medicine. More
Danielle Ofri’s TED Talk on “Deconstructing Perfection”
Shame, guilt, fear—you can’t tally these on a spreadsheet, but they are the biggest elephants in the room when it comes to medical error. Danielle Ofri makes a powerful, against-the-grain case about perfection that could lead to dramatic improvements in care and ultimately could save lives. More
How We Treat Our Fellow Americans
The blossoming truth of “No Apparent Distress†is that a segment of American society has been casually cast aside, left to scavenge on the meager scraps of volunteer health services, and failing that, left to die. Some politicians might call this “choice.†A more medically accurate term would be abandonment. 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
Danielle Ofri at the Moth MainStage
Danielle Ofri tells the story of the existential crisis she faced on Day One of being a doctor at Bellevue Hospital. Performed live for the Moth. More
Adding Spice to the Slog: Humanities in Medical Training
As soon as we’d finish rounds on the medical wards I’d race to pass out an Anatole Broyard essay in the nanoseconds before dispersal entropy overtook our team. More
Storytelling in Medicine: the Passion and the Peril
So much of medicine is about stories—the ones we hear, the ones we tell, the ones we participate in—that it is no accident that doctors and nurses are attracted to stories. More
Physician Suicide and the Tyranny of Perfection
Doctors have the highest suicide rates of any professional group. But losing two of our newest members within a week of each other is a painful reminder of the dangers of our profession. More
Medical Memoirs
Given the epidemic of doctor-writers out there, one could be forgiven for assuming that a book titled “Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories,†written by a practicing physician, would be a work of nonfiction (and indeed, it is being marketed as such). But in the introduction, Holt writes that he is “recreating experience as parable,†More
Hidden Curriculum of Medicine
Why do students lose touch with what drove them into medicine by the third year of school? Danielle Ofri talks about the hidden curriculum of medicine and its effect on students’ empathetic skills. More
An Epidemic of Disillusioned Doctors?
“That’s it,” I thought, after an overwhelming morning in clinic. “I quit!†It’s a thought that crosses the minds of the majority of doctors, it seems. A survey of more than 13,000 doctors found that more than two-thirds feel negatively about their profession. More
When Doctors Feel Fear
I remember the first time I laid eyes on an actual amygdala, after slicing through a brain with a repurposed kitchen knife in neuroanatomyclass. That’s it? I thought. That nickel-size splotch tucked below the temporal lobes was the seat of my fears? It was monumentally underwhelming and even lacked
the poetic almond shape that its Latin name connotes.
More
Fear is a Primal Emotion
This was it—the first code I was in charge of. After two years of racing to codes as a first- and second-year resident, now suddenly, the code was mine. I was the one to call the shots, to direct the care, to assign the jobs, to make the decisions….Shit! More
