Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Life in Emergency Medicine”
Image above is a 2000 year old child potty trainer from ancient Greece. Accepting turds as a fact of life from an early age prepared me well for a career in medicine. Growing up, my father and great uncle built a small outdoor aviary in our back yard, where we raised tropical finches and quail that we sold to pet …
Physicians frequently get the choice roles in prime time television (if that’s even a thing any more in the era of Netflix), so it’s easy to forget that working in the Emergency Department is a team sport, where emergency nurses comprise the front line. One of our docs put up a saying in the doctor’s lounge long ago: ER doctors …
Yesterday, despite your not having felt it, a seismic shift occurred in medical school tuition. It was not my Californian bona fides as a resident of the earthquake state that put me in touch with this new reality. Rather, NYU announced that medical school tuition would henceforth be completely free for all NYU medical students. In an era where $200,000 …
In medical school and residency, a very few righteous professors warned us of the dangers of accepting pharmaceutical meals, textbooks or other swag lest they influence our prescribing patterns in nefarious ways. The drug reps wandered the halls of our sorry solitary training grounds, a corps of fit and attractive young people whose attention most nerdy physicians could never have …
When I was a medical student, the folks who wanted to enter emergency medicine seemed to fit a certain mold of effortless atheleticism: rock climbers, surfers, weekend soccer league players, people whose cords of toned muscle rippled under zero percent body fat. One of my UCSF classmates who went into EM auditioned and made the final cut for an Abercrombie …
As a reformed academic, I still have moments of unrequited yearning to teach the young (defined as my age minus ten years). While I enjoy sharing interesting x-rays or clinical findings with our techs, nurses, and the docs I work with, my favorite teachable moments fall under the category of Anecdotal Medical Education (AME). Most of us working in the …
True story from approximately 2002. It’s 3am the day after St. Patrick’s Day when an extremely concerned 21 year old woman accompanied by her bleary-eyed boyfriend arrive in the Emergency Department of a large urban trauma center. I am the resident on the night shift who sees them. Me: How can I help you today? Patient: My pooh is green! …
Doctor goggling means diagnosing yourself with a new new terminal disease every week or so. It’s morbidity for the morbidly curious. It disproportionately affects those who know just enough to be dangerous. While it’s considered to be more of a med student malady, for lucky shmoes like me, it can endure far beyond residency. Ordinarily I enjoy being under the …
The first year of medical school is spent acquiring the complex vocabulary of medicine. Reading books on finance and investing requires an analogous amount of deciphering intimidating terms that obfuscate useful concepts. One can make the case that intimate comprehension of a vocabulary distinguishes those who truly understand a branch of knowledge from those who don’t. Unfortunately, there is often …
As part of a fellowship in International Emergency Medicine, I spent six months (multiple trips over a two year period) in northern Ethiopia. One of the most otherworldly experiences I had during that time was exploring Lalibela, a town which occupies a revered place in Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. A walk through town revealed temples hewn from single enormous slabs of …