Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Physician Wellness & Life Design”
My birthday. We said farewell to a visiting relative with an early morning departure, then the house was silent while everyone else slept. I’d just worked 3 back to back shifts during a week that likely contained the highest volume day in our emergency department’s history. It was that brutal. As a souvenir, I’d brought with me a sniffle (unlikely …
I’m a big fan of at a glance measures that provide disproportionate insights into the big picture. When visiting the home of fellow physicians, one of my favorite metrics is the height of the toilet reading journal pile in the bathroom. Pile is an interesting word to describe this phenomenon. In addition to connoting a heap of items lying atop …
Jerome Groopman, a Harvard Professor of Medicine, recently wrote in his capacity as staff writer for the New Yorker about using science to change habits. The piece provided insights and support from the literature about why certain strategies (from financial to healthy living) work while others fail. One fascinating aspect was a new understanding of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. …
The title of the post comes from correspondence from Danny Kahneman to Amos Tversky regarding insights into irrational human decision-making processes. It was during their collaboration in elucidating the concept of loss aversion. Regret minimization is a related but distinct concept. Given dual-choice gambles where a rational actor should choose the option with greater statistical odds of benefit according to …
Taking a dump is one of the most satisfying activities one can aspire to in middle age. And yet, this is not a Beavis and Butthead post I refer to the ability to eliminate, for lack of a better term, the “life clutter” that obstructs productivity and happiness. Perhaps it derives from the sobering reality that there are likely more …
Like many docs, I took all the accelerated classes our high school offered. I remain in touch with several close friends from those days. Some stay with me for our shared values, others for our shared history. At the wedding of one such friend, I had the opportunity a few years back to reconnect with the class gunner. For those …
Burger Time The Atlantic prides itself on provocative writing that skewers and roasts the sacred cows of the elite progressive class. While some journalists overdo it to the point of inducing iconoclast fatigue, the most deft inflict psychic wounds that cause the reader to reconsider vulnerabilities in their thought processes. Daniel Markovits, a Yale Law Professor whose book is excerpted …
This morning I was getting my lazy butt back into the swing of cycling when I noticed a chunk of rock sliding down a hillside next to the road. It was a fist-sized chunk, and did not threaten to strike me, but it focused my attention on something I seldom consider, the geologic time scale. Rocks like this scatter alongside …
Yesterday I watched a particularly moving film, The Farewell. [I hate spoilers, so nothing that follows is not already evident in the trailers.] The film follows the Americanized branch of a Chinese family through the eyes of a millennial granddaughter as she returns home for a final visit to the family matriarch who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Heavily …
The following post comes courtesy of Vagabond MD, a radiologist who cut back who is a friend and much revered guest-poster on this blog and many others. In it he addresses the (possibly vanishing) culture of his single-hospital democratic group (SDG), a physician-owned partnership that was historically the basic unit of medical practice. It has recently been replaced en masse …