May
31
What ED Crisis? (And Other Random Thoughts)
May 31, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Shake that Money Maker They say there is a crisis in the Emergency Rooms and while I certainly see a little of its effects at my own program, the crisis is not universal. Some Emergency Departments compete for patients, at least this is my understanding from the numerous billboards I saw the other day as [...]
May
27
Commander of the Devout Like all good medical students, I await the arrival of the Mother Ship as promised and foretold by the Prophets in whose names we have dedicated our lives. But I have begun to doubt. The world goes on beyond the walls of our medical school. I catch brief glimpses of it [...]
May
23
Inspired By Actual Events (House DO, one of our good blogfriends, has taken a hard look at the requirments of medical training and decided to divert to PA school. To him is this article dedicated-PB) As an intern, I once rotated on a service that had a lot of Physician Assistants. One night on call [...]
May
20
Post-o-rama
May 20, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Mission Creep The conventional wisdom is that the American health care system is broken. This is the party line parroted by the various media organs of the dependocracy in their attempt to stampede an excitable public towards socialized medicine. Like a lot of the conventional wisdom, the idea of a broken health care system gets [...]
May
16
Is it Worth It?
May 16, 2007 | Leave a Comment
(With a hat-tip to Hybrid Vigor for the idea-PB) Dear Medical School Hopeful, I wouldn’t presume to imply that you haven’t given your decision to apply to medical school a lot of thought. Of course you have. The application process alone will weed out anybody who is not completely serious. Still, you may have some [...]
May
13
Hippocrates Calls for Close Air Support
May 13, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Standardized Propaganda I am often asked to reconcile my love for the Marine Corps and my support for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan with the tenets of the Hippocratic Oath which, by conventional wisdom, seems to preclude a doctor from calling in an air strike. There are many versions of the Hippocratic Oath and [...]
May
11
Sink or Swim: Call and The New Intern
May 11, 2007 | Leave a Comment
(I had call on my first night as an intern almost two years ago and as of last week I am officially and forever done with call. It’s been a long two years and I won’t miss it. I’m working the 11PM to 9AM shift in the Emergency Department this month and I marvel at [...]
May
8
A Quick Note
May 8, 2007 | Leave a Comment
100K My hit counter tells me that I’ve had 100,000 unique visits to this blog in the last six months. Add that to the 120,000-or-so visits before I started using Sitemeter and that’s not bad for sixteen months of blogging. Readership is growing and I like to think it’s because I have a lot of [...]
May
6
Other Medical Careers Part Two: Complementary and Alternative Medicine
May 6, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Quacks Like a Duck Almost everything about Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) is bunk and its purveyors are at best deluded and at worst quacks and charlatans who would make the snake oil salesmen of olden days blush from shame. Maybe a hundred years ago you could make a case for magic potions and mysterious [...]
May
4
Grow a Pair There he lies, six-foot-five inches of corn-fed American manhood, a horizontal slab of sinew and muscle with a chiseled chin, tousled hair, and perfect teeth whining like a little girl because the nurse is late with his pain medications. For God’s sake buddy, didn’t you get the memo? Of manhood, stoicism is [...]