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.)
A basic and well documented characteristic of human behavior is that, in any group, most of the activity is done by a small number of individuals.
"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."
John Kenneth Galbraith, economist (1908-2006)
You can never make the same mistake twice.
The second time you make it, it is a choice.
The leadership where I work likes to claim that our local hospital and I have the same goals. Well, they are wrong.
Drs Groopman and Hartzband, in Your Medical Mind, reference the phenomenon of ‘creeping paternalism’ in medicine. How true.
Becoming a good person seems like an obvious goal, a no-brainer. Despite that, not many of us really try. And fewer succeed. What's the problem?
I am old enough to have been able to watch the nurse practitioner role in medicine evolve from a misunderstood and distrusted ‘physician extender’ to a real colleague. It will be interesting to see how the doctorate of nurse practice (DNP) evolves.
The language of medicine is highly evolved and complex and allows clear, detailed, specific and unambiguous descriptions. Except when it’s not.
Joseph Campbell observed that the more a culture felt threatened or controlled by unpredictable forces, the more rituals it would evolve, the more complex they would be, and the more vigorously they would be enforced.