My blog represents my personal experiences and perspectives. This includes many anecdotes from my medical practice. I have been scrupulous to anonymize these anecdotes and to avoid ever belittling or making fun of patients. (I often make fun of and criticize myself, my colleagues, and the institutions where I have worked.)
Before you decide about treatment, you should ask about NNT and NNH. These are numbers that can help you understand how likely the treatment is to help (or harm) you. They are easy to understand - though they can seem confusing to calculate.
The model of the expert physician making decisions for a compliant patient and giving orders to obedient nurses and technicians is thankfully disappearing, being replaced by a patient-centered team approach.
It’s Father’s Day. My Dad is gone, but not his impact.
The need for autonomy is one of the most basic and powerful intrinsic motivators of human behavior. One sees this in the plaintive cry so often heard in institutions, large and small: Why Wasn’t I Consulted (WWIC)?
We all tend to confuse probability with uncertainty. We shouldn’t.
It happens at least once a week: a patient who equates natural with beneficial.
Rudiger Dorbusch, a German economist who spent much of his career at MIT, famously said:
“Things always take longer to happen than you expect – but once they happen, events unfold more quickly than you’d ever have imagined.”
A wonderful thing, imagination, with the vast possibilities it allows.
Nana Cindy, Bumpa Pooh and (Princess) Phoebe were enjoying a wonderful pretend picnic in her bedroom. Phoebe was describing in sometimes startling detail the preparations for the picnic when she started pantomiming, pouring a liquid on her hands, rubbing her palms together, and then applying it to her doll. We asked if she was using sunscreen, and she paused and looked thoughtful while she considered the question.
“No,” she said. “Moonscreen.”
Two weeks into my third year psychiatry clerkship at the University of Rochester, I was summoned to the Dean’s Office to meet with Dr. Orbison.