Tag: doctor-patient relationship

Tiffany Lin Tiffany Lin (5 Posts)

Columnist

David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Tiffany is a medical student at David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, class of 2019. She graduated with a BS in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics from UCLA in 2015. Tiffany is passionate about breaking down barriers between patients and physicians and is an advocate of humanism in medicine. When possible, she loves to travel and experience the culture, landscapes, and food from different places.

The Patient | Physician Perspective

Lessons learned from both sides - A column exploring the qualities of a physician from the perspective of a physician in training, through the lens of a patient.




The Patient | Physician Perspective: An Introduction

Published by Tiffany Lin

In this column, I hope to explore various qualities of a physician that we learn through medical school experiences — whether it be through class, shadowing, research, or even interacting with peers — but also to introduce a patient’s perspective in each case. Midway through my junior year of college, I was diagnosed with Cushing’s disease, a rare endocrine disorder that affected every aspect of my life. Throughout the next year and a half, I lived as a patient of my disease, while simultaneously trying to hold onto my plans and aspirations of becoming a physician.

Drug Addicts and Crazy People

Published by Wesley Thomas

“Great, six weeks of crazy people!” This is the sort of attitude with which I went into my psychiatry rotation. Couple this with the fact that while most schools only have four required weeks of psychiatry, my school has six weeks. Of course, I would have more free time compared to other rotations — it is called “psychation” for a reason — but at what cost? Mental illness was something that made me uncomfortable.

A Good Doctor

Published by Jeff Hassebrock

Friday afternoon psychiatry didactic sessions are a holy time among medical students. A golden weekend rapidly approaches and the afternoon, typically spent trudging through paperwork, is instead spent listening to residents talk with minimal effort required to listen. At the end of a frantic third year of rotating, sometimes it’s nice to just set the busy work down and take it all in. Granted, I’ll actually have to learn the info at some point before the test, but for one afternoon it’s nice to be passive.

How the Institutionalization of Medicine Has Destroyed the Doctor-Patient Relationship, by Gary Shlifer, DO

Published by Gary Shlifer, DO

As I reach the conclusion of an over decade-long training process to become an internal medicine physician I find myself facing a dilemma I really did not expect. Yet while my training has prepared me to care for the sickest patients, I really don’t understand how to get paid for my work. The long and complicated medical training process does little to prepare young physicians for real world practice where a plethora of insurance, billing, documentation, and pharmaceutical companies prey on naive young physicians.

Shifting Perceptions: Lessons Learned from a Student-Run Clinic

Published by Shilpa Darivemula

Each time we came in for our Islamic Medical Association of North America (IMANA) Medical Clinic, we never knew what to expect. IMANA clinic is a community-based project led by the Albany Medical College Family Medicine Office that connects medical students to the local Muslim population through screening and education clinics at Masjid As-Salaam. This masjid is the central prayer space and community support for many of Albany’s Muslims. The unique quality of this service-learning program is its emphasis on cultural competency and understanding the role of spirituality in medical care.

White Coat Hypertension

Published by Therese Castrogiovanni

A very simple but interesting phenomenon in health care is the concept of “white coat hypertension.” Initially, if you take a patient’s blood pressure, it may be abnormally high. This is simply because they’re nervous about the situation. If you just wait a few minutes and then take the patient’s blood pressure again, it has often decreased a fair amount. It’s a simple enough concept — the patient is worried that something is wrong and this makes their blood pressure increase. However, this leads me to the question: why do we make our patients so easily nervous? That is not our place in the health care equation.

Doctors Don’t Like Fat People

Published by Annika Burnett

“I could never be a primary care doctor,” my friend and fellow medical student says as she pops a french fry into her mouth. There are five or six of us sitting around a hospital cafeteria table, grabbing a quick lunch between our morning and afternoon lectures. “I mean, seeing fat people with diabetes and heart disease all day. It would just be so frustrating, because they did it to themselves, you know?”

After the Autopsy

Published by Diane Brackett

I went through medical school without experiencing the death of a patient I had personally cared for. In contrast to what may be seen on the trauma service, my surgery clerkship was full of routine procedures: appendectomies and cholecystectomies, port placements, excisions of pilonidal cysts, and miscellaneous “ditzels,” as pathologists may refer to them as. Sure, I have had patients who were quite sick and did not have much time left to live. For example, I once performed a neurologic exam on a comatose teenager in the ICU, whose arteriovenous malformation had bled wildly out of control despite prior neurosurgery. But with the constant shuffling of rotations that medical students must endure, I was always in and out of patients’ lives before they had a chance to leave mine.

Managing Chronic Illness: Three Lessons Learned in Training

Published by Ryan Yarnall

While I could list close to 100 lessons, I believe focusing on three of the most important ones would aid other future health professionals in managing and ultimately treating the chronic illnesses that will become even more prevalent in many of our future patients. As a disclaimer, I do not claim to be an expert on this topic, but these ideas spring from my own personal reflections.

Untitled: The Persona of Medicine

Published by Chiemeziem Eke

As young children growing up, we all called each other by first name. So did our parents, relatives, teachers, and anyone else we ran into that wanted a way to identify who we were. As adults, attending physicians are still called by their first names around the same group of people from childhood. However, patients and most of the clinical staff may not even know the physician’s first name. When transitioning from a senior resident to a faculty physician, some event occurs where that beloved first name is molted. After the right of passage is completed, the rookie doctor becomes a veteran doctor; free of restrictions, supervision, and a first name.

Chiemeziem Eke Chiemeziem Eke (1 Posts)

Contributing Writer

University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston

Chiemeziem is a third-year medical student at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and a graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington. He is interested in gastroenterology and working with its high-risk patient population. He wishes to share his evolving opinion of medical culture, stemming from past perception in contrast to present experience.