Columnist and in-Training Staff Member
Morsani College of Medicine at the University of South Florida
Ajay is a pediatric resident and a Class of 2017 graduate of the SELECT MD program at the University of South Florida. He is passionate about delivering primary care to underserved populations—specifically, low-income and homeless patients in urban centers. Ajay will be specializing in pediatrics, with a particular interest in child maltreatment.
M.D. or Bust
Numerous studies have documented that medical students lose empathy during clinical years, becoming jaded and pessimistic. This has been linked not only to diminished enjoyment of our work, but also to worse patient outcomes. My goal is to sustain the humanistic values that drive so many of us to medicine, so that, instead of being quelled by cynicism, our idealism can be refined by wisdom.
Room One Wendy Smith had thinning hair, penciled-in eyebrows, and a frame so thin that you could see, in painstaking detail, bluish-grey veins emanating from beneath her pale skin. Cancer had taken so much from her that she almost didn’t look human. But the feeling in the room was extremely human. Fear — palpable fear. Fear made all the more palpable because this was an aggressive, rare form of cancer. Fear made all the more …
The world’s oldest person, a 116-year-old Japanese woman, Ms. Misao Okawa, recently shared with the media her secret to a long life: “Eat and sleep and you will live a long time. This advice is certainly appealing to sushi lovers (Ms. Okawa’s favorite meal!) and those who desire the return of “naptime” in school and the workplace. While the benefits of sleep were discussed in detail in a previous article on Bridging the Gap, the …
Rather Humerus A web comic aiming to shine a creative and Rather Humerus spotlight on med school.
Rather Humerus A web comic aiming to shine a creative and Rather Humerus spotlight on med school.
By this the time of year, most first-year medical students have finished with anatomy. Anatomy: for most of us, this course is our first time seeing a deceased human being in an academic setting. And for some of us, the first cut we make on the first day of anatomy is the first cut we make on a person’s flesh. Sound scary? It did to me. But it also sounded amazing. To me, anatomy seemed …
I recently sat in on a luncheon with a few other current MD/PhD students as we chatted with, and fielded questions from, half a dozen applicants to our program. This brought back a multitude of memories from my own admissions season five years ago. I’ve also had plenty of experiences in the past few years interacting with talented undergraduates who are considering applying to MD/PhD programs, so I’d like to share some reflections on my process, …
I read an interesting article this weekend entitled “Why Nutrition Is So Confusing” that described what all med students know: nutrition data is largely inconclusive, often contradictory, and falls short of strong claims that would make for truly useful recommendations. Trials are often done for a few years and then extrapolate to decades or, conversely, populations are followed for decades and then analysts try to pull out a few recommendations. Although many of us philosophically favor diet …
We have all asked that question to someone at some point. If you are currently in medical school, chances are you aced your way through high school. But that was high school, where you could have solved a bunch of exam papers from the previous years and skimmed through chapter summaries weeks before GCE Advanced level exams and still pulled out an A. Sadly, those days are over and you have been thrown into a rather massive pool of …
There exist, in truth, three simple words that strike dread into the hearts of every physician: Do. You. Remember. This phrase was introduced to me in the middle of first year. I was spending time in my medical student lounge when a link popped up on my newsfeed to a TED talk by Dr. Brian Goldman, an emergency physician from Toronto who hosts the radio show White Coat Black Art and who has also authored the book “The Night Shift.” In …
While walking around campus at the beginning of the new semester, it is hard not to notice the sudden appearance of signs instructing us to “Breathe Freely” because the campus is now “Smoke-Free.” The new law has challenged some students and faculty to forego smoking altogether, and has enticed discussion about the regulation of harmful addictive substances, often revealing the social baggage associated with addictive behavior. The duality of alcohol, for example, as both the …
Little did I know this adage was, in fact, Aristotelian in origin and not dreamed up by my mother. Nevertheless, it is one I remember first hearing recently: somewhere along the line as I progressed from high school to college and now to medical school. As I felt more intense academic pressure, as I complained more about the volume or difficulty of what I had to study, or if I was just plain exhausted—these were …
The only thing different was the room number and the day of the week. “Hey, our favorite flyer is back,” said my attending as I went to see the patient in room 10 for the first time in my life. The patient was already doomed as I became jaded, cynical and wondered what the health care system or we as physicians could do with patients like this. Let’s be clear, I still had never met …
Columnist Emeritus
Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine
Hi! I am an Internal Medicine resident at Georgetown University Hospitals. I graduated medical school from Texas A&M Medical School and Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, TX. I went to Case Western Reserve University where I did my bachelor's in medical anthropology and a masters in public health. Life is good. I am an inherent optimist who simply enjoys life. Avid Dallas Cowboys fan! In all my free time (ha ha), I enjoy traveling and spending time with friends and family.
Storytellers
Patients are the true storytellers. They come in with pathology, we interpret physiology and prescribe pharmacology, but their stories are what we remember. They shape our experiences and how we practice medicine.
