Opinions

Mark Kashtan Mark Kashtan (3 Posts)

Contributing Writer Emeritus

Medical College of Wisconsin

Mark was born and raised in Sacramento, California and grew up backpacking in the High Sierras, a place from which he still draws inspiration. He attended college at UC Berkeley before heading east to study medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He has an older brother, also in medicine, and two dogs that live back home with his parents, a retired vascular surgeon and registered nurse. He wants to be a pediatric surgeon when he grows up.




The SGR: What Happens in Washington, D.C. Now Could Affect the Rest of Your Career

Published by Mark Kashtan

If you’ve happened across any political news outlets in the past month or two you may have seen some headlines about something called “SGR.” Perhaps more likely, you may remember in years past hearing political pundits or reporters talking about a “doc fix.” In fact, both of these are the same thing, and if you’ve heard those terms thrown about more than once it might be because the issue has come up at least once a year …

Keeping The Night At Bay: Medicine and Suicide

Published by Jocelyn Mary-Estelle Wilson

“How do we [become a society that produces people] that are young and beautiful and hate themselves?” – Dr. John Green “Well, I always say, it would be good to go away. But if things don’t work out like we think And there’s nothing here to ease the ache But it there’s nothing there to make things change If it’s the same for you I’ll just hang.” – Matchbox Twenty I finished reading “Night Falls …

Ethics in Training: Creating Humanistic Practitioners from Competent Clinicians

Published by Haris Ashraf

Medical training prides itself on being an art, never simply a black-and-white field where answers to increasingly complex health questions are merely algorithmically derived. It follows then that the only way for medical knowledge to transcend this rigid, computational process is through the accumulation of clinical experience, which over enough time should inform our intuition to the point where we become masters of navigating a sea of grays. This archetype is classically understood to be …

The Doctor-Patient Waltz

Published by Farah Dadabhoy

After graduating from college, I worked at an outpatient oncology facility. I was an administrative assistant, manning the phones, sorting the mail, hounding the doctors to sign insurance forms and complete refill requests—basic, unspectacular stuff. I inhabited the bottom of the workplace hierarchy, beneath the nurses and nursing aids, below the receptionists and medical assistants. They say nurses and nursing assistants are a patient’s first point of contact; in reality, a patient’s first exchange with …

Examining Altruism in Medical Student Volunteer Work: A Reply to Pham’s Article

Published by Sian Hsiang-Te Tsuei

Author’s note: This article was written by Sian Hsiang-Te Tsuei and Amy Po-Yu Tsai. Pham (2013) questioned medical students’ underlying reason for volunteering to perform physical exams at free clinics and concluded in the article “Volunteering in Medical School: A Waste of Time?” that volunteering will never be a waste of time because medical students matriculate to “improve the quality of life for humankind, to service the underserved and to advocate for our patients who …

Take Back the Conversation on End-of-Life Care

Published by Amol Utrankar

The epicenter of the debate surrounding costs and utilization of health care is on end-of-life care. A full one-third of Medicare expenditures are spent on chronic illness patients in the last two years of life. For perspective, consider this graph: our costs of care are comparable to those of European countries for the first five decades of life, but we spend twice as much on people in their sixties, thrice as much on people in their seventies, and over four …

Beyond the Walls of Hospitals: Life as a Physician-Congressman

Published by Corey Meador

Currently, 20 physicians hold seats in the US Congress. Their training in the medical profession has instilled within them a unique skill among politicians—the capacity to listen. Not unlike the diagnostic process, a congressman must listen to those citizens that he or she represents and establish the main concern and the plan to address that concern. In speaking with two of the current physician-congressmen, I learned that listening to citizens as a US congressman very …

The Medical Gaze: What Do Foucault and the French Revolution Have to Do with Modern Medicine?

Published by Steven Lange

As students of medicine, we become familiar with the proper course of questioning that leads us to identify a patient’s problem. We take for granted a traditional paradigm of questioning, asking: “What brings you into clinic today?” and “Where does it hurt?” What we do not realize is that this conditioning is the result of a great epistemological leap taken after the French Revolution, which shaped the face of modern-day medicine.

A Mind Based Approach to Addiction Treatment

Published by Ozan Toy

Addiction is a chronic illness characterized by the use of a psychogenic substance despite negative consequences associated with its use. Biological dependence is marked by cravings, increased dose and/or frequency of use due to tolerance, and withdrawal symptoms upon cessation of substance abuse. Addicts gain pleasure via the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is released from the ventral tegmental area of the brain and into the nucleus accumbens. This reward encourages and solidifies the addictive behavior and …

Medical Students: The Anti-Millionaires

Published by Daniel Coleman

A few months ago, CBS Moneywatch published an article entitled “$1 million mistake: Becoming a doctor.” Aside from the possibility that devoting one’s life to helping others might be considered a mistake, I was struck by the “$1 million” figure. Was it actually that much? I mean, $1 million is a lot of money. When I was younger, millionaires seemed a rarefied breed. They drove expensive cars and had houses with names like “Le Troquet” or “Brandywine Vale.” The …

Women, Autoimmune Diseases and the Demographic Transition

Published by Ryan Denu

The incidence of autoimmune diseases has tripled in the past few decades, and they cost the United States more than $100 billion each year. Additionally, an autoimmune disease typically lasts for the person’s lifetime, and there are no known cures, which further put a major financial burden on the health care system. Current estimates show that 5-8% of people have autoimmune diseases worldwide, and it is estimated that over 23 million Americans suffer from them. …

Elder Abuse and You: Read Between the Lines

Published by Shaudee Parvinjah

My medical school recently hosted a sweet elderly patient to share her experience of living with gout. Mrs. J is a poised, elegant and vibrant lady of 82 years who has the stamina and vitality of a young adult. Her zeal for life and positive attitude—despite the debilitating disease—is contagious. Her openness about her struggles and the challenges she faces as a patient make her an invaluable teacher to us as medical students.  She states that …

Shaudee Parvinjah Shaudee Parvinjah (1 Posts)

Contributing Writer Emeritus

University of California Irvine School of Medicine

Shaudee is a Class of 2016 medical student at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine.

A native Californian, Shaudee earned her BS in biological sciences at the University of California Irvine in 2011. She feels lucky to continue to live in and study medicine at UC Irvine where she can be close to her family and friends with whom she shares a loving bond. An Avid yoga practitioner, Shaudee firmly believes in the power of inner peace and a calm mind as key to health and happiness. She is the founding co-chair of UCI's AMA-MSS chapter and is passionate about health care policy at the local and national level. She continuously strives to educate herself on health policy by interacting with local congressmen and women and advocating for GME funding, and other pertinent issues to medical students. She is also the Co-president of UCI's Family Medicine Interest Group and chair of patient education for the student-run Shifa Health Clinic in Orange County.