My blog represents my personal experiences and perspectives. This includes many anecdotes from my life and from my medical practice. I have been scrupulous to anonymize all medical anecdotes and to avoid ever belittling or making fun of patients. (I often make fun of and criticize myself, my colleagues, and the institutions where I have worked.)
My institution is striving to become more patient-centered, and is making good progress, but has an odd way of showing it sometimes.
The primary care providers (PCPs) I work with all love what we do. Partnering with patients to improve their lives is challenging but rewarding work, and I almost never hear regrets about going into primary care. But we do complain. And one of the things we like to complain about is that we often feel abused by our better paid limited-specialty colleagues. It doesn’t happen often, but when it happens, the bad feelings may linger for a long time.
George Bernard Shaw said: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
Medicine has made great strides in the last 100 years.
Science is not a linear or predictable path to truth.
A recent commentary in the New York Times eloquently addressed the phenomenon of psychiatric diagnoses biasing clinicians and resulting in poor care. One concern that arose in the comments was that this might increase the likelihood that patients would withhold crucial diagnostic and therapeutic information, to their detriment.
We see lots of skin problems in primary care.
Simplicity and transparency are key ingredients to organizational health.
I made an extra trip to the nursing home to visit him on his hundredth birthday.
Trust but verify (Doveryai no Proveryai) is a Russian proverb that underlies an important principle in medicine. We need to trust our patients, our tests and our knowledge - but must also always remember to check and verify.