"My lifelong quest to become a healer — over 40 years as a family physician, scientist, and researcher with the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and the Department of Defense — has led me to conclude that the best way…
Boundaries mean I want to be in a relationship with you, even if you are an organization. And so I need to define what's OK and what's not for you. And so I help physicians develop scripts about how to do that and weigh the pros and cons so they…
People were confusing resilience with grit, and we've been asking physicians to adapt to unhealthy oppressive symptoms and systems and show perseverance despite huge amounts of emotional exhaustion. And so, they wanted people to be grittier when physicians were already showing huge amounts of perseverance despite challenges during COVID and…
"It’s not that physicians need to be more resilient. We’ve failed to provide them with the goodwill to be human and embrace their “whole selves” (people who are resilient often but not always), access to safe and consistent relationships to heal, and systems that support their well-being. Physicians have persevered…
“What kind of questions should one be asking themselves if they want to consider having a colonoscopy with or without anesthesia?” If the doctor recommends a colonoscopy, go ahead and do it. If there is a doubt, don't leave any stone unturned, and many people don't know that colonic polyps…
“When you talk about the pain that you were feeling while you were having a colonoscopy, how severe was that pain? What kind of intensity were you talking about on a scale of one to 10?” First of all, when he puts a colonoscopy right there, it's discomfort. Maybe 1,…
"If you did not have a colonoscopy, I would still recommend that you do it in a conventional way and get that IV sedation. But if you are an adventurer as I am, I would highly recommend that you do a colonoscopy the same way I did without anesthesia. I…
When you're having that conversation with your teenage child who is about to go to college, go a little bit deeper into that conversation. What kind of questions should we be asking them? What kind of questions should they be thinking about? Looking at it from a college student perspective,…
When you go away to college, this is your first time being an adult. So there are a lot of things that you have to do. One of them should be filling out an advanced directive. A HIPAA release is part of the forms that students have to fill out,…
"Suppose you’re getting ready to send your young adult off to college for the first time. In that case, you’ve likely been spending the summer getting college dorm and apartment essentials lined up: bedding, storage cubes, first aid kit, extension cords, dry erase board and other room necessities. But have…
It's very important for us to have an identity that's more than just a physician. You have to have other ways to charge up your battery. And I like to tell my clients, “You got to show up at least on a high yellow because you are going to get…
"This last doctor was also the happiest doctor I have ever met. He was not a youngster but had a wonderful following of patients and was loved by the entire hospital staff. And he had a very nice singing voice. Today this would be considered dangerous." Ronald Halweil is an…
Why can I just not make myself happy here? And it was this realization that it was time to move on. It's time for me to do the things that really ignite my passion again. And it's like the music had stopped in medicine, and I think a lot of…
"Not too long ago, a circumstance occurred. I have experienced similar circumstances several times in my career. However, this time, my response was different. It was like a switch in my brain flipped. I was ready to leave clinical medicine. It was time for the next chapter. Wow! It was…
We've seen this interesting pattern in some places globally where when we see a lot of COVID, but we don't see much flu. But influenza flies up when COVID starts coming back down from its peaks. So I think we're still going to have some unstable influenza and COVID transmission,…
"Do you think the pandemic is over? And if so, why continue to get vaccinated as we go from pandemic to endemic?” So we are going to eventually get into an endemic phase where we have the disease without these horrible spikes. But a couple of points. We're not there…
In this special sponsored episode. I’m joined by Dr. Filip Dubovsky. He is an infectious disease physician, executive vice president, and chief medical officer responsible for medical and clinical affairs and related activities at Novavax. A recognized leader in vaccine development, Dr. Dubovsky brings more than 20 years of infectious…
“Give us a sense of how dire a situation is in a rural setting.” In the lowest tier hospitals, 40 to 50% of those hospitals are in the red. In rural areas, it is so common to have less than 20 days of cash on hand. If you had 10…
Overall, the system was designed for an urban setting where you've got a demographic of Medicare versus private insurers, and that pay base really determines your viability. When you move to the rural area and flip those ratios, so you have a high percentage of Medicare and Medicaid, the numbers…
"Without a strong rural health care system, our nation’s ability to expand and contract with surges in demand will become very limited. When hospitals work together, they can better ensure that no community is left without a rural hospital for urgent care." Richard Watson is an emergency medicine physician. He…
“If doctors were to see patients like yourself, definitely empowered, bringing in your data and suggestions for therapy that a physician may not be comfortable with. What kind of advice do you have for us to better listen to you?” My first advice would be to evaluate what we've brought…
We spent an hour together, and he was just puzzled by what I was doing. We went through a phase where he asked me if I was trying to play doctor, and I said, “No, but I'm trying not to have this happen to me.” And what he did is…
"I have come to appreciate why doctors find self-directed patients challenging, if not downright difficult. I wish all docs would engage with us, hear us out, and offer an explanation and further discussion when they disagree. The doctors I choose to work with seem to understand and respect my efforts,…
We used to be a clinic and a hospital; now, we are called a firm. So we've taken on business language and are now called providers. No longer doctors; most people now in medicine are employees. So their independence has been taken; the worst is that the patient has become…