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.)
Gloria Steinem said: “The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.”
Based on my experience, telling the truth is more reliable at pissing others off than setting anyone free.
It always bothers me when patients seem less interested in focusing on their visit than I am.
Sunset
(for KE)
Your sun has set, and I was not prepared.
Your light, hard shuttered, gone missing from my path
Reveals no more the places you would show.
Your warmth reduced to memory, mere hint of what it was
While yet it burned.
The moon has tried its best, through faint remembrance
Offered up through gentle darkness by the night.
Scarce real enough that shadows come to pass,
It warms me not, nor lets me see what walks outside my walls.
A basic and well documented characteristic of human behavior is that, in any group, most of the activity is done by a small number of individuals.
"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."
John Kenneth Galbraith, economist (1908-2006)
You can never make the same mistake twice.
The second time you make it, it is a choice.
The leadership where I work likes to claim that our local hospital and I have the same goals. Well, they are wrong.
Drs Groopman and Hartzband, in Your Medical Mind, reference the phenomenon of ‘creeping paternalism’ in medicine. How true.
Becoming a good person seems like an obvious goal, a no-brainer. Despite that, not many of us really try. And fewer succeed. What's the problem?
I am old enough to have been able to watch the nurse practitioner role in medicine evolve from a misunderstood and distrusted ‘physician extender’ to a real colleague. It will be interesting to see how the doctorate of nurse practice (DNP) evolves.