Contributing Writer
University of California, Riverside School of Medicine
Frances Tao is a graduate student at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Previously she finished her third year of medical school at UC Riverside and will return in fall 2019 to finish her medical degree. She graduated with a B.S. in Psychology and a B.S. in Biochemistry & Cell Biology from UC San Diego in 2014. Her professional interests include lifestyle medicine and global health. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, sketching, and traveling.
During and after this spooky holiday, let us, as current and future health care providers, make a joint effort to prevent our youth from becoming nicotine-addicted zombies by warning them of the tobacco industry’s marketing tricks and encouraging them to stay in e-cigarette-free environments.
Overhead, we hear the monotone hospital announcer’s voice through the intercom system: “CODE BLUE. First floor. Short-term cardiac care unit. Room…”
Medicine is a sacrifice. I knew this upon admittance into medical school. I did not know the sacrifice would be an erosion of my humanity.
“Are you okay, sweetie?” asks the intern as we start to ascend. She is completely unconscious, looking into nothingness. I start to feel the adrenaline. “I don’t think she’s okay,” remarks the intern.
It’s okay to feel in the cadaver lab. It’s what your first patient wanted for you.
Time for empathy. / Time for empathy? / Collect a complete psychiatric history. / Plus, medical history with dates of diagnosis and current medications.
In medicine, as in medical training, time is the enemy. There is not enough time to talk to patients or study for board exams. There is not enough time to read the latest literature. At the end of the day, there is not enough time to make plans with friends or develop a gym routine that is anything but sporadic.
My heart is not a lacy valentine. / It is an anatomic pump / Engineered evolution / Strong walls of long runs
Thomas Jefferson has said his piece and this time I won’t attempt to say anything back. This time I won’t stay silent either. This time, I’ll write.
I want my residents and attending physicians to be aware of the elements that have so far shaped my medical school experience–a certain racial awareness, if you will–and to be as enthusiastic about teaching me as I am about learning from them.
EMRs have been devastating — residents spend 60% of their time in front of the computer writing their note, where it used to be five minutes in shorthand. We have not made things more efficient. We’ve made things worse for physicians in practice.
When you pick a residency, the name is irrelevant, where you go is irrelevant, your score is irrelevant. If you don’t like the people, your life will be miserable.
Editor-in-Chief
Brown University Alpert Medical School
Nihaal Mehta is a member of the Class of 2020 at Brown University Alpert School of Medicine. Originally from Lexington, MA, he also attended Brown for college, graduating in 2014 with a degree in Health and Human Biology and subfocus in Global Health.
Nihaal’s interests lie in medicine and its intersections: with health systems, policy, and the humanities. In college, he worked as a Writing Fellow, a Teaching Assistant for biology and public health courses, and assisted in the design of a course that examines controversies in medicine. Before returning to Brown for medical school, he spent a year working in consulting on health care business, strategy, and policy. He plans to specialize in Ophthalmology, and has conducted research focused on optical coherence tomography and retinal disease.
