Learning how to become a doctor begins long before medical school. Through our personal experiences with the healthcare system, we develop our own ideas of “good” and “bad” medical care. In this way, the physicians we meet, either...
Read More
There have been a handful of times now where, standing before a patient with poor prognosis, I found myself at a loss for words. Whether they were rapidly deteriorating or on the cusp of rapidly deteriorating, every single...
Read More
Or blue-green. The exact color of the hospital-issued scrubs are not as relevant as their purpose: to prevent eye strain (as opposed to the all-white scrubs of prior, think of it like ‘snow-blindness’) as well as to provide...
Read More
A normal part of being in the medical field is being confronted with death. We talk about it in textbooks filled with statistical terms like mortality, morbidity, fatality, and survival rate. We spend years learning about disease processes:...
Read More
We learn a lot from what we see. We invent visual modalities that capture our surroundings, converting them into numbers to be shared and studied. Medicine has manipulated physics and made these forces visible—radiation, sound, the oscillation of...
Read More
“도와주세요!” (“Help me, please!”) My mom yelped as her right leg rested on the back door of my car. The urgent cry for help unsettled me—she used an extreme honorific, as if calling for assistance from a stranger...
Read More
“What’s your favorite cocktail?” A question like this is usually asked at a dinner party, a weekend getaway, or maybe as an icebreaker in a group setting. But I wasn’t making small talk over drinks—I was standing at...
Read More
When we hear the words “lung cancer,” our minds immediately ask, “Did/does the patient smoke?” What do you as the physician, or maybe the physician-to-be, do when your patient says, “Lung cancer? Me? How could that be? I’ve...
Read More
Throughout my clinical rotations, I’ve often found myself deeply, deeply exhausted by the end of the day. Some days that’s not a surprise, such as when I’ve been on my feet since 5 AM on surgery, or have...
Read More
When I approach the door of an exam room, I am always bracing myself. Always preparing myself – my heart, brain, and mouth – because somehow, my inclination is always to start the encounter with, “hi, I’m the...
Read More
Our world lost the brightest of lights on October 16, 2021 when Keenan Clark McNamara, 29, passed away. Keenan was a special soul on this Earth, and he illuminated the lives of everyone he met. Keenan had the...
Read More
Note from the Editors-in-Chief: September is National Suicide Awareness Month. As such, this article addresses physician suicide, an issue which already has or will likely affect all physicians. If you or a friend is struggling and considering self-harm...
Read More
I remember the three months between finishing college and starting medical school, feeling the combination of nervousness and excitement as I tried to imagine what medical school would be like. Three years later, I look back at that...
Read More
