My blog represents my personal experiences and perspectives. This includes many anecdotes from my life and from my medical practice. I have been scrupulous to anonymize all medical 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.)
This started out as my Ten Rules for Patients (to parallel my Ten Rules for the Primary Care Physician) but I just didn’t feel comfortable making rules for patients.
Clinicians like making the diagnosis of strep (streptococcal) throat (and patients hate being told they have a viral sore throat) for the same reasons: a belief in the ability of antibiotics to shorten the illness and prevent serious complications That’s what we doctors were taught, and that’s what we’ve taught our patients. How justified is this belief? Well, there are problems.
Sometimes the answer comes from an unexpected place, and only after we stop looking.
I understand the concept of the hospitalist and I’ve seen the data. There is no doubt about their value. But...
Sometimes I have to stop, sit back, and just admire a patient for something. Today it was grace and humor under fire.
"It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters, in the end."
(Ursula K. LeGuin)
My first hike of the season is always both tentative and special. Tentative because I can never be sure of either the trail conditions or my body. Special, because the mountains are my friends and restorers.
Simplification may be necessary when we try to cram complex or messy truths into comprehensible prose or usable tools, but the underlying dishonesty and inevitable distortions should be noted rather than denied, lest we begin to mistake the symbol for the thing.
We’ve all been there, facing a problem so large or complex it seems insoluble. Fortunately, insoluble problems are solved with great regularity. If that weren’t true, we’d still be living in caves and eating only what we could catch or pick.
What can we do to increase our chances of solving the big problems in our lives and workplaces? Here are three suggestions.
I used to dream about a new pair of cross-country skis for a season, evaluate different options, wait for a bargain, then purchase an expensive pair, and finally spend hours prepping the bases. Having invested so much time, money and effort in the skis, it seemed natural to do everything in my power to preserve them. I waxed and scraped them repeatedly, stored them carefully between uses, and skied carefully to avoid rocks or other hazards. In fact, I respected the value of the skis so much, I only used them in perfect conditions.