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…

I came across this tool, the 55-word story, when I researched my recent post on narrative medicine. I liked it so much, I made this blog post all about it. In From Doctors’ Stories to Doctors’ Stories, and Back Again by Marcia Day Childress, PhD, in the AMA Journal of…

There are small moments of reflection that pop up in any given day that can affect how we approach our practice of medicine. Something at home affecting us at work, or vice versa. Like a Venn diagram, the two circles overlapping by just that slight amount at the center. …

When I first turned to writing, I had no knowledge of the field of Narrative Medicine. It took 4 years of medical school, 3 years of residency, 3 years of subspecialty fellowship, and over a decade in practice before I learned of it. (that’s 20-plus years for those counting). Throughout…