Medical Student Guest Writer
Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University
Pranav Reddy is a joint MD/MPA candidate at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University and Harvard Kennedy School. Pranav has worked on issues at the intersection of health and human rights for marginalized populations in Rhode Island, the Dominican Republic, and India and will be training in obstetrics and gynecology after graduation. Twitter: @born_reddy
On March 11, an invitation-only meeting will determine the future of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) Step 1 exam. The results will profoundly affect how all future American doctors are taught.
I met Julian six months ago. He was the first patient I watched go through a buprenorphine/naloxone induction. My preceptor carefully guided him through a series of deeply personal questions: How old were you when you first started using? What is your drug of choice? Have you ever injected? How much? Have you ever traded sex for drugs? When did you last use?
When I took a job as a residency coordinator in graduate medical education at a local community hospital, I made myself a promise: I will not date a resident. They’re too busy, we work together, and we have nothing in common.
The first time I saw her on the ward, I was instantly curious. There was something so innocent about her; she looked younger than her age, like a little girl. She was barefoot and had uncut, unkempt hair, as if she had accidentally wandered in from a different time period.
The recent confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court raises concern about the future of reproductive health, particularly access to abortion and affordable contraception. Although his impact on reproductive rights is to be determined, those who will be disproportionately impacted by further compromise of reproductive rights will always be the most vulnerable women among us. This includes the uninsured, poor, and incarcerated.
The recent ruminations of Drs. Katsufrakis and Chaudhry in the form of an invited commentary in Academic Medicine, entitled “Improving Residency Selection Requires Close Study and Better Understanding of Stakeholder Needs,” has garnered a significant amount of attention on Twitter. Drs. Katsufrakis and Chaudhry’s commentary was in response to a well-written and well-reasoned article by a group of medical students published in the same journal recommending the USMLE Step 1 transition from a numeric score to pass/fail.
In 1999, the American Board of Internal Medicine and Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine defined a “problem resident” as a “trainee who demonstrates a significant enough problem that requires intervention by someone of authority, usually the program director or chief resident.”
A quiet, frail, emaciated gentleman in his 60s who was dying of cancer. What made him different was that he was shackled to the bed, one arm and one leg bound to the bed of a barren room, lit only by the pale blue light from the window that cast the silhouette of bars on the floor. This was the prison unit.
In order for the country to make meaningful progress in tackling the opioid epidemic, we need a cultural shift in the way patients and providers think about pain.
Pharmaceutical companies and physicians are being demonized for their manufacturing and dispensing of opioid analgesics. Money-hungry executives from Big Pharma caused the crisis by brainwashing doctors to prescribe these medications left and right. Greedy doctors want patients dependent upon them for years, ensuring a steady stream of paying patients in their waiting room. Drugs drive the market. Drugs lead to big profits for everyone involved. The more drugs, the better.
For most of our childhoods growing up in the Midwest, the Iowa we called home was a swing state proud of its investments in education, was welcoming to refugees from around the world, and was the third US state to legalize marriage equality.
Physician burnout has emerged as an increasingly concerning phenomenon in medicine. As high as 51% of physicians in a Medscape survey report symptoms of burnout. Doctors face higher demands with less time and support. Academic medical centers, which historically have been insulated from outside forces, are now seeing larger patient censuses, leaving less time for physicians to work through each patient’s case carefully.
“Locker room culture” is a common trope that has been used to describe medical community of the recent past. Current practitioners will say that culture is, unfortunately, still prevalent.
Resident Physician Contributing Writer
Boston Medical Center
Syed is a medicine resident who is interested in health policy and health administration. He primarily looks at diversity and inclusion and leveraging them to create a medical workforce that can provide higher quality and better access to care for uninsured and underinsured populations. Syed wants to work on pipeline programs and on recruitment, retention and promotion of underrepresented minorities in medicine and also on creating medical school and residency curriculum that frames medical education in a social justice contest and addresses the intersection of race, sex and gender and medical sciences.
