Attending Physician Guest Author
Former physician who trained at NYU Medical Center/Rusk Institute
Richard Morgan was a board-certified physician specializing in physical medicine and rehabilitation who trained at the Rusk Institute of NYU Medical Center. He graduated NYCOM in 1998. He went into private practice in New York City with a focus on sports medicine and musculoskeletal disorders. Throughout his early career, triggered by an early injury and surgical procedure, he followed a dark path down an abyss of addiction that ultimately led him to federal prison, where he was sentenced to 14 years for conspiracy to distribute oxycodone. After serving 97 months of his sentence, he was rewarded with an early release. In the one year he has been out of prison, he has begun the process of not only reconnecting with his family and society, but he has begun the process of giving back and helping others with chemical dependency. His story was recently highlighted on the Dr. Oz show, and he shared his story with his alma mater at NYCOM, stressing the importance of recognizing the signs and symptoms of addiction in colleagues.
I never thought it could possibly happen to me. As a practicing physician with an active chemical dependency to opiates and benzodiazepines, I fell down the rabbit hole with an intensity that I never believed possible. Although I am blessed and fortunate to have climbed out of that abyss, I have never forgotten some of the things that led me to the precipice.
I first heard of Yayoi Kusama last year when her spellbinding exhibit came to the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Admittedly late to the international zeitgeist of Kusama, what initially drew me in was her story — a Japanese-American avant-garde artist who suffered from severe mental illness and successfully transformed that suffering into riveting artwork.
Every job is different, but my experiences so far have drawn a very stark contrast to life as a resident. Now imagine, if you can: you stroll into work at whatever time you want. You round on your patients, write notes and leave. The rest of the day you give verbal orders over the phone while you hang out at the beach.
Writing is the greatest self-excavation tool I have found. It was always something I enjoyed, but during my medical training it became something much more important than that.
George Orwell said, “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” If Orwell was right, the profession of medicine and the patients it cares for could be in big trouble.
Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, is a physician at Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in country. She writes about medicine and the doctor-patient connection for The New York Times and her writings have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, and on CNN.com and National Public Radio. She is the author of four books, numerous essays, and the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review.
One of the most difficult transitions a young medical student makes is the graduation from bench science and classroom learning to the clinical application of knowledge in the clerkship years of training. Wide-eyed and at times naïve, physicians in training wade, or are sometimes thrown headlong, into life on the wards. These young doctors-to-be are inundated with patient stories; they bear witness to hardship and loss as the patients under their care are often at their nadir.
Dr. Christine Montross is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and the Director of Counseling Resources at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Her first, Body of Work, is a thoughtful meditation on medical school anatomy lab, the history of dissection and our fascination with the human body. In Falling into the Fire, Dr. Montross recounts striking cases from her psychiatry training, and the paradox of diagnosis when ambiguity is so rife in medicine.
Peer Reviewer Emeritus
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Christy Duan is a resident doctor at Northwell Health (formerly North Shore - Long Island Jewish Health System). She graduated from Albert Einstein College of Medicine with a Medical Doctorate in 2016 and the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Science in Statistics in 2012. She is an award-winning writer who has published in The Detroit Free Press, Quartz, KevinMD.com, MedPage Today, Student Doctor Network, Abaton, and more. Christy is passionate about social justice and global health. Her work has spanned from the Usambara mountain range of Tanzania to the sprawling metropolis of Hong Kong, and from community HIV interventions to data mining. Read more of her work at http://www.christyduan.com.
