What Twitter has meant to me — I joined Twitter in September of 2019. A Gen-X holdout, it was my first foray into a social media platform. (If this sounds crazy to you, it was because during the MySpace and Facebook years, I was mired in medical training and then with “balancing” a career and young family, and the idea of spending more time on a computer was not my idea of a productive way to spend…

(A list in the satirical style of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency) Everyone around you has stopped believing something dangerous is out there because they can’t see it with the naked eye. You’ve seen people die from it, and your life will never be the same, but those who haven’t lost someone…

Published by Jennifer Lycette, MD on May 18, 2021 Recently, one of my clinic patients asked me to administer his intramuscular medication injection. I appreciated the vote of confidence but had to tell him he was mistaken in thinking that my skill would surpass that of our nurses’. “Trust me,”…

Before COVID-19, I left the practice of medicine for what would turn out to become an entire year. Then, the pandemic happened, and I found my way back to clinical practice. During that time away from medicine, I discovered five things that transformed my life and practice. With the guidance…

Here’s my curated list of top 5 articles on burnout for this week, with a theme: the EHR (electronic health record). 1. Physician Burnout: Are Too Many Patients Making Doctors Sick? by Joe Harpaz In this Forbes article, the author explains the burden of administrative (non-clinical) tasks that contribute to burnout. “Physicians don’t hate technology … what they hate is bad technology. “ One example: many (if not most) EHR (electronic health record) systems were designed for primary care. But a specialist using an EHR designed “for a primary…

Spoiler Alert: Contains minor spoilers for the memoir “Educated” by Tara Westover “You seem very angry,” I say to my patient. It’s a basic technique in our physician tool chest, but I’d forgotten to try it — reflection. He hesitates. Surprise crosses his face. “I am,” he says. …

In a recent talk I gave for colleagues, I ventured outside the box. I searched for a metaphor to make cancer treatments easy to understand. Around the same time, it so happened my kids decided we needed to re-watch all of The Avengers movies at home. …

Happy week of International Women’s Day 2019 (IWD2019)! In the spirit of this year’s IWD2019 theme, #BalanceforBetter, I pulled together this collection of posts from and about women in medicine. I hope you will draw inspiration from them for your own lives and practices. 1. Being a Woman, by Dr. Anne Malatt An uplifting reflection on our lives as women and physicians. Excerpt: In medicine, I am seen as a woman at times when it suits some agendas, and not seen as a woman when it does not suit. But no matter what veils…

In celebration of Valentine’s Day this week, it seemed fitting to put together a post on the concept of love in medicine. Only…there’s not many of us out there writing on the topic. After a google search of “love in medicine” and “love and doctoring”, I found the following three…