As I joined the psychiatry team during morning rounds, it was my turn to present on a new admit: a patient with congenital deafness presenting with auditory hallucinations and suicidal ideation. Communicating in American sign language (ASL) through...
One day, before going to my CCE, I called their office to ask if my preceptor was in. It took five minutes of explanation for the person to whom I was speaking to understand I was a medical...
Of all the ways that our world has changed in recent years, perhaps no one aspect of our lives has changed more than our relationship with technology. You already know this. You’ve read a similar statement hundreds of...
One of the first doctors I shadowed as premed was a new attending at Mayo Clinic in Phoenix. He took a call halfway through his shift from his fiancé, telling me that this was the only time of...
In 2021, a Harvard dermatologist used the term “Zoom Dysmorphia” in an interview with The Guardian. The term, a play on the psychiatric condition body dysmorphic disorder, has been used to describe preoccupation with appearance resulting from excessive...
Over the past few years, the development of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized many industries, including healthcare. One of the most promising developments in AI technology for healthcare is the creation of chatbots such as ChatGPT. Chatbots like...
War. War never changes. And neither does humanity’s response to it: anger; disgust; a desire to help; and for some, the lust for thrills. The idea of war tourism is not new. Historians and journalists have been described...
As medical students and future physicians, we are granted permission to witness some of the most intimate and vulnerable moments of our patients’ lives. We are invited to carry with us our patients’ hopes, dreams, fears, and sorrows....
Kneeling on the ruthlessly cold, travertine bathroom floor, lights off, abdominal muscles convulsing, lungs heaving, and hands holding her hair back as she purges her own stomach of boluses that once looked like her mother’s famous Mac ‘N’...
From October 11th through November 3rd, the Latino Medical Students Association (LMSA), the Office of Student Affairs, and Marketing & Communications set up an altar for Día de los Muertos – a Latin American tradition to honor loved...
There are a number of inevitabilities in life. Death, billionaires avoiding taxes, and people asking med students what specialty they want to go into. As someone who entered med school with the singular goal of emergency medicine (as...
According to the Association of American Medical College’s 2020 Medical School Graduation Questionnaire, 7.3% of graduating medical students had dependents[1], up from 3.1% in 2016 [2]. There are more people entering medical school as parents or becoming parents...
Dear students, I am writing this to you on your first day to encourage you to wear your mask indoors and in the library. I am Akimel O’odham (Pima) from the Gila River Community. I was born at...
On January 4, 2021, I received my first dose of the Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. Signifying many different things to me. Personally, it represents safety in some measure. As an Arizona resident, it creates a sense that things are...
Eddie Case is a previously healthy COVID-19 survivor and one of the first 200-identified COVID patients in Arizona. He has graciously offered to share a full account of his story so the public can get a glimpse of...
This Letter comes from a group of students who have placed social justice at the top of their priorities. Students who have joined their community in protest since June 1st, 2020 and have missed not one day of...
Next to me was an emaciated, homeless Vietnamese man in his late fifties. We were sitting in the Emergency Room together, his hand tightly clasped in mine. He was dressed in dirt and wore a baggy, tattered overcoat....
I recently revisited the Class of 2019 Oath for the first time since my White Coat Ceremony in 2015. At the University of Arizona College of Medicine–Phoenix, we don’t recite the traditional Hippocratic Oath, or even a modified...
The summer between the first and second years of medical school can be an odd existential crisis. You feel like the countless trials by fire should have produced something a little more substantive, a little more accomplished than...
This speech was given by Student Body Vice President Cecilia Chou at the Second Look Luncheon to the incoming Class of 2022. We are printing for the benefit of incoming students who were unable to attend and for...
I don’t claim to be an authority on how we should approach life in medical school. I know that everyone’s experience is different, and we all have our own daily problems and battles. I am not writing this...
The Longitudinal Patient Care (LPC) Course takes places during years three and four of the UA COM-P curriculum. Students are placed in interprofessional teams and are paired with a community mentor. These mentors have chronic medical conditions and...
Rushing to take care of every person in the room, constantly checking fluid levels and carrying trays full of equipment, I started questioning whether this is something I could do for the rest of my life. My legs...
I heaved my carry-on into the 5th overhead compartment of the week and squeezed past a catatonic passenger to take up residence in my usual middle seat. I raked my fingers through the chasm of my purse in...
Healthcare workers suffer some of the highest rates of workplace violence. A quick Google search will pull up countless stories about doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers who have been victims of attack. Anyone who works in healthcare...
On my first day on the job as a jail doctor, twenty-five-year-old Peggy* was brought by guards to clinic after fighting with another inmate. This was her third booking into jail in 6 months. Needle track marks obscured...
In our current age of medicine, we often tout the benefits of evidence-based medicine for our patients: better outcomes with fewer unneeded interventions. However, even the name of this approach depends upon the nature of the evidence, which...
I was walking out of a grocery store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in November of 2013 when I received the phone call: I’d been admitted to medical school. I cried, called my mom, and celebrated...
I wrote this piece to reconcile my feelings and thoughts about choosing a specialty as I have moved through the first two years of medical school. I’m sharing with the hope that these thoughts may impact others (even...
As medical students, we are taught during Doctoring to obtain a detailed history from a patient in an appropriate amount of time. Alongside the medical history questions, we inquire about occupation, highest degree, diet, and spiritual beliefs that...
The past week in our country’s politics has left many of us stunned. Whatever our personal opinions, there had been a pretty clear idea of what we thought the two Americas were ever since the 2000 election permanently...
Let’s all share a collective sigh of relief: we’ve reached Election Day. No matter which party you support, you’re likely feeling either exhausted, disgusted, or both. The campaigns, which have been plagued by scandals, conspiracy theories, name-calling, racism,...
Simone Biles, Usain Bolt, and Michael Phelps are household names throughout the world. These athletes are known for their success on the world’s highest competitive level; they are Olympians. Since a French winter’s night in late 1892, the...
Before I began medical school, I always considered the city of Yuma, Arizona, as a mere pit stop on the drive to San Diego, California. Every summer, my family would stop in Yuma to refuel on gas and...
I’m writing this article from 30,000 feet above Albuquerque, en route to the East Coast, where I will spend the next several days re-entering the world as a healthy and well-adjusted human. I have spent the last month...
When I was asked to write this article, I initially declined. First of all, I wasn’t really sure what I would write about. A piece on being atheist in medicine would be just a piece about me in...
If you are a student at UA COM-P, then you’ve navigated an aspect of our curriculum, Community Clinical Experience (CCE), designed to expose MS1s and MS2s to clinical medicine during our pre-clerkship years. As a family medicine fangirl...
An internal memo to the members of the Society for Truculent Underappreciated Practitioners of Inpatient Doctoring To arms, august compatriots! Our very way of life is threatened by the hordes of barbarians at our gates. Armed not with...
SUPPORTING OUR PATIENTS BY SUPPORTING EACH OTHER Since my Scholarly Project involves transgender health, I routinely peruse some of the new research that comes out involving health disparities in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community....
I like what is straightforward—who doesn’t? However, I also enjoy facing complex situations: what can compare to the satisfaction we feel when we are able to detangle convoluted clinical pictures? But what I love—and fear—is the inexplicable, the...
No, but where are you REALLY from? Unlike some of their friends who sent their children to visit relatives almost every summer, my parents did not bring my sister and me to China until after my high school...
& START LOVING FAMILY MEDICINE Archived image unavailable: “Country Doctor” W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures, 1948 “Country Doctor” – One of my favorite photos. By W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures (TIME Magazine), 1948. Growing up, my...
Myth #1: Family medicine isn’t challenging and exciting. It absolutely is!! Family Medicine docs are diverse. We have solo practices and work in large academic centers. We work as hospitalists, take emergency medicine shifts, deliver babies and perform...
Growing up, I never planned to become a physician. As a relatively healthy child, I assumed all doctors were functionally the same as the one I visited for a yearly checkup or for the occasional cough. However, in...
Archived image unavailable: image11.jpg Students of the Class of 2018 drafting the class oath – July 2014. You tackled the MCAT, maintained a competitive GPA, held leadership positions, and made it through the interviews. And now you’re sitting...
