Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Physician Wellness & Life Design”
I describe myself as an unrepentant Californian. I grew up hiking along coastal foothills and spent my youth learning respect for the Pacific Ocean. I’m at my happiest sporting shorts and sandals. When I wanted to impress girls in high school, I’d wear my good flannel (that was really a thing). I love it here. When you live in Eden, …
We recently hosted a friend of decades who had a fly-by-night trip through town. We collect weird friends like elderly mid-western matrons collect Hummel Figurines. We regard this label as high praise. One of the blessings of time is a loss of inhibition. This can be awkward, as in the dementia patient who grabs at anatomy he or she should …
Middle age shifts your perspective and broadens your frame of reference. Time has helped me accumulate multiple examples that demonstrate the evolution of both aspirations and exasperations. Then: Stasis is death. Seek novelty in every experience. Always keep moving. Now: Repetition creates opportunity for eventual mastery. Ritual lends comfort. Routine is a blessing. Roots form only when a seed stays …
Like a lot of overachievers who end up pursuing medicine, I entered college with a great deal of credit from a combination of Advanced Placement tests and courses taken for credit in night school at my local community college. Thanks to classes in physics, French and philosophy taken as a high school senior, I was exempted from a slew of …
For the past several years, sea kayaking along the California coast has been my workout of choice. A precarious goat trail brought me down the face of a 300 foot cliff to a rock-strewn beach during my weekdays off, where as often as not I’d greet a couple of 50- and 60-something surfers I was friendly with who shared my …
The past week has been brutal: A loved one was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. A loved one was diagnosed with a new cancerous tumor, staging still being conducted. A loved one was diagnosed with a rapidly progressive neurodegenerative disorder, scuttling plans to retire abroad. All this is in addition to watching a close friend struggle with disabling mystery symptoms for …
This morning I read a wonderfully nuanced piece of writing by Peter Hessler in the New Yorker, which explored several delicate themes with great empathy. The unifying theme was the inherent tension of being identified as “other” in society, and how such a misfit identity can create a disconnect in how one is treated by society. Hessler captures something that …
For generations, anger was believed by social science to be a vestigial remnant of our ancestral evolution, the emotional equivalent of your appendix. It served no function other than to inconveniently cause embarrassment and negative social consequences. A recent article by Pulitzer prize winner Charles Duhigg in The Atlantic examined the purpose of anger in the context of our current …
Resolutions get an understandably bad rap at this time of year. Many people make empty commitments to implement change that are discarded almost as quickly as they are publicly announced. Go beneath the surface to understand the origins of the word and you might find a concept directly applicable to burnout in medicine. Etymology is the study of the origin …
There’s an Ice Cube song laid over an old sample (the Isley Brothers’ Footsteps In The Dark), perfect for weight lifting back when I was younger: It Was A Good Day. It was playing in my mind as I reflected on the past five days: Spent three mornings bodyboarding at the beach, despite working a night shift. Rode my bike …