Medical

Amidst the tangle of mail consisting of grocery ads and a retirement fund quarterly report and the membership renewal form for the botanical gardens, I spot a small manilla envelope emblazoned with the return address of my children’s school. This is what I have been waiting for with equal parts hope and dread. Last year…

I looked at a free book chapter from Harvard Businesses Review today and saw a striking graph illustrating what we’re up against in primary care today, and I remembered a post I wrote eight years ago about burnout skills. Some things we do, some challenges we overcome, energize us, or even feed our souls because of…

When I speak to medical students and residents, their number one question is, “Should I follow my passion or choose a specialty that pays well?” With so many students finishing their training deeply in debt, they are feeling a push to go into a specialty that pays better than average, thinking that it will solve…

Before the pandemic, we had an epidemic of physician burnout, with many physicians caught in a cycle of exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of purpose. All the change and uncertainty the virus has brought certainly doesn’t help! It’s now more imperative than ever that physicians build resilience to all the pressures and stress of our careers.…

We often think something will or someone can make us feel better. When the system appears broken, the culture toxic, the space unwelcoming, we are uncomfortable. To feel more comfortable, we seek to change the surroundings and, when that seems impossible, change ourselves to fit in. We quiet our inner voices to create an external…

I am a 40-year-old Black, female pediatric psychologist, and I contracted COVID-19.  So did my 95-year-old grandmother.  This virus flourishes within the inequities, bred by historical and current racism, of social determinants of health, having a more negative impact on Black and brown individuals.  Nevertheless, we both survived.  Black Girl Magic persists, and with the…

A guest column by the American College of Physicians, exclusive to KevinMD. Practicing medicine has always been hard, and as all of us have experienced over the past several months, living and working through a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime pandemic has only made it more challenging. For those on the front lines of patient care, the added…

A conversation with friends and family usually starts with, “How are you holding up?” My answer is not usually about work, but rather a response of …”Well, it’s going OK, but I wasn’t really meant to be a homeschool teacher.” As the pandemic marches on, many areas of the country have discussed the delayed reopening…

It’s not every day you see hundreds of doctors flooding Twitter with pictures of themselves in swimwear. The trending hashtag #MedBikini arose when health care professionals began posting in solidarity to demonstrate how maintaining a life outside of the clinic, shockingly, does not detract from one’s merit as a physician. In fact, it makes them…