doctorswithoutborders:
Mothers as Primary Caregivers
We hope everyone had a wonderful Mothers Day this year! At MSF projects around the world, mothers are usually the primary caregivers, spending much of their time not only working and raising children, but looking after the health of their families. To all the mothers, you are an inspiration for our work
thenotquitedoctor:
I first heard my mom was sick on Monday afternoon. I had seen her the night before but nothing had been said. I was visiting on break from med school and I am sure she didn’t want to worry me. Five days earlier at a routine eye exam they had checked her blood pressure. It was 223/130, which is…
Some docs in my ER, after practicing for many years, become so immune to patient anxiety about their symptoms that the docs treat every patient as if they’re exaggerating, and they’ll barely touch them. Then when a really sick patient comes along, they’re surprised and order all the things to cover their asses.
People will be really sick and people will die. And that’s okay as long as they don’t die in YOUR care — It’s like hot potato.
— ER Physician on admitting patients to the hospital from the emergency department
Healing is an art, medicine is a profession, health care is a business.
— New York Times, September 5, 2011.
Of 2000 years of history, all memorized in the minds of studious Chinese youth, I have only been there a month. A month of tripping over simple words, saying and refining the phrase of blood pressure, blood sugar level, weight, height, see the doctor and still doing it rather shittily. A month of reading my own English books, still speaking in English to my peers, a stone crushing my Chinese tongue that has been rotting for years. In spurts of bravery I speak to my parents, stumbling along, sounding like a complete idiot. I understand it’s a necessary obstacle to any language but it’s still frustrating as hell. I was only there a month, I keep telling myself. It’s a mere blip in my whole life. Like she said, nobody knows of my life in America, nobody knows my reality. It’s easy to shed your problems in a foreign country, it’s easy to relax. But you always have to come back, don’t you? Still, the circularity doesn’t escape me. My grandparents escaped China during the war to reside in Taiwan. My parents came from Taiwan to America for opportunities. And their daughter subsequently returns to the land of my grandparents and ancestors. There’s that saying, those who are born into fortune do not know it (身在祝福中不知福). I had opportunities beyond the reach of so many people I saw in China, yet it was I who wanted to fit in with them…
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up up and away: America
nursling:
“Health is not a commodity. Risk factors are not disease. Aging is not an illness. To fix a problem is easy, to sit with another suffering is hard. Doing all we can is not the same as doing what we should. Quality is more than metrics. Patients cannot see outside their pain, we cannot see in, relationship is the only bridge between. Time is precious; we spend it on what we value. The most common condition we treat is unhappiness. And the greatest obstacle to treating a patient’s unhappiness is our own. Nothing is more patient-centered than the process of change. Doctors expect too much from data and not enough from conversation. Community is a locus of healing, not the hospital or the clinic. The foundation of medicine is friendship, conversation and hope.”
David Loxtercamp, author of A Measure of Days: The Journal of a Country Doctor, as read in his interview with NPR’s Liane Hansen.
Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it.
— Plato (via medicalstate)
The new process has enormous consequences not only for the lives of the applicants but, its backers hope, also for the entire health care system. It is called the multiple mini interview, or M.M.I., and its use is spreading. At least eight medical schools in the United States — including those at Stanford, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Cincinnati — and 13 in Canada are using it. At Virginia Tech Carilion, 26 candidates showed up on a Saturday in March and stood with their backs to the doors of 26 small rooms. When a bell sounded, the applicants spun around and read a sheet of paper taped to the door that described an ethical conundrum. Two minutes later, the bell sounded again and the applicants charged into the small rooms and found an interviewer waiting. A chorus of cheerful greetings rang out, and the doors shut. The candidates had eight minutes to discuss that room’s situation. Then they moved to the next room, the next surprise conundrum and the next interviewer, who scored each applicant with a number and sometimes a brief note.
— More Medical Schools Are Screening Applicants Closely for People Skills - NYTimes.com (via hartmd)
View Larger Sometimes I spend more time drawing my notes than studying them…
The greatest wealth is health.
— Virgil (via medicalstate)
