Tag: doctor as patient

Elizabeth Stachtiaris Elizabeth Stachtiaris (1 Posts)

Contributing Writer Emeritus

New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine


Elizabeth is a Class of 2016 student at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine, in Old Westbury, NY, which is her hometown. She rides her horse Champus before school every morning, and competes with him on the A-Circuit during the summers and weekends. She is a co-founder of NYIT COM's first-ever acapella group, the Note-O-Chords. Her current field of interest is Emergency Medicine.




One Horse Pill, BID

I remember the accident vividly—up until I fell unconscious. I can still feel the wind whirling past my ears, roaring at me, smacking my face, forcing tears from my bulging, dilated eyes. I remember traveling at what seemed like the speed of light, my heart pounding wildly in my chest.  I weighed my options in a split second: dismount and lose a leg or remain aboard and lose my life.  The pulsating hoof beats hammered against …

Orthopedics: A Thank You. Perspectives of a Patient, Family and Hopeful Applicant.

I quickly became acquainted with the practice of orthopedics during my childhood, as various boyish and overly rambunctious pursuits left me with over a dozen broken bones. Each break was relatively innocuous, at most fixed with some pinning; however, I became instantly aware of the gravity of orthopedic injury when my father broke his back on New Year’s Eve 2002. I was 14, and he was driving me to a friend’s house when we were …

Medical Student as Patient

Snow and frost sculpted mazes in the streets; I struggled through the wind, fluid freezing in my joints, unpaved sidewalk sliding below my shoes. I was skating on a pond in Transylvania; the desolate snowscape wrapped around the hill crowned with the dark building, speckled but starkly rising. Maybe there were vampires in there, but my hands tingled with warmth as I opened the metal handles. The guard glanced but said nothing. I felt immediately …

Defining a Good Doctor

Hippocrates, the famous Greek physician and father of Western medicine, once said, “To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art—if they desire to learn it—without fee and …

Non-medical-school Medical School Curriculum

I’m sitting by the window in a hospital room with my eight-year-old sidekick who is being treated for rhabdomysarcoma, here for chemotherapy. Sidekicks is a student-led initiative at UMass Medical School that matches medical students with pediatric oncology patients in order to build long-term, non-medical relationships. He is watching his favorite cartoons and so he is unresponsive to my attempts at engagement. My own five-year anniversary of being in remission from Hodgkin’s lymphoma just passed …

A Taste of Your Own Medicine

I remember when I was young, my parents told me they wished to be a kid again. Now I understand why. Do you miss the days when your only task was reading one of Aesop’s Fables? I do. Do you remember “The Cobbler Turned Doctor?” If not, I’ll refresh your memory. It’s about an unsuccessful cobbler who decided to move to another town where no one knew him so he could work as a doctor …

Applied Bioethics: Marathoning and Medicine

Paternalism and medicine have a storied past that is difficult to grasp in the abstract. For me, the values of autonomy and beneficence were cemented on the day I ran my second marathon. After the first one, I remember being asked what the hardest part of the race was. “Every mile was harder than the last,” I replied. After that day I felt like I was in the best shape of my life, dampened only by having fallen nine minutes short of my goal. Resilient, I recovered for a week, trained for three and then raced again in the Indianapolis Monument Marathon.

John Dougherty John Dougherty (1 Posts)

Contributing Writer Emeritus

Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine


John Dougherty is a medical student at the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois.