Contributing Writer
University of California Riverside School of Medicine
Jasmine is a first year medical student at University of California, Riverside School of Medicine in Riverside, California class of 2023. In 2019, she graduated from UCLA with a Bachelor of Science in microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics. She enjoys traveling, eating and napping in her free time. After graduating medical school, Jasmine would like to pursue a career in surgery or emergency medicine.
As stressed medical students looking for an eventful destination to spend our spring break, my friend and I chose to take a trip to America’s Big Apple, New York City. On a sunny day in NYC, I remember enjoying our morning cups of coffee and walking into a subway station when, suddenly, an older man shouted at us, “Take your corona and get out of my country!”
In the neuro intensive care unit, I took part in a meeting with my team to update a family on the status of their loved one. It was my first time in this type of meeting, especially for a patient that I was directly involved in caring for. To our team of medical professionals, he is our 51-year-old male patient with a 45-pack-year smoking history, but to his family, he’s a son, a husband and a father.
There is a cost crisis in medicine: the health care industry accounts for about 18 percent of the GDP in the United States, and predictive models see this increasing in the coming years. This is a problem for the country as a whole as an estimated 41 percent of working Americans have some level of medical debt.
so one day / i can translate to my patients / what my family missed.
My friends and I wished we knew how to flourish from the beginning, so we decided to create Wards & Boards, a peer-to-peer mentorship mobile app. The app compiled advice from fourth-year medical students who completed each clerkship designed for third-year students beginning their first rotation.
This piece is focused on the applications of empathy and compassion in decision-making. How can we distinguish between them? In its simplest form, empathy deals with feelings while compassion deals with understanding.
A picture is worth 1,000 words, and the world today is full of symbols. Emojis share paragraphs of information. Logos inform us about what a company represents or does. Shapes and colors share messages of safety or caution on the road. Symbols are everywhere and understanding them brings deeper understanding to the world around us. Medicine is a field of precision, and that is precisely why it is so strange that such confusion exists as to which symbol should represent it.
Dr. Brent James was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Senior Advisor at the Leavitt Group and a Senior Advisor at Health Catalyst, in Salt Lake City, Utah. He holds faculty appointments at the Stanford University School of Medicine and at several other universities. He was formerly the Vice President and Chief Quality Officer at Intermountain Healthcare. In this episode, we discussed his leadership background, value-based medicine, as well as his outlook on the future of medicine. We hope you enjoy this episode of Leading the Rounds.
How could I study for my next exam instead of focusing my energy on the crisis around me? Was I selfish for still worrying about doing well in school while others died alone in the hospital on a ventilator? In these moments, I found respite in “Learning in War-Time,” a sermon delivered by C.S. Lewis to the students of Oxford in 1939 just as World War II began. In this timely sermon, Lewis addressed the chief concern on students’ minds: Why continue to study philosophy or science “when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance?”
Mr. K had been admitted with dehydration and malnutrition secondary to diarrhea in the setting of HIV. During his stay, he developed refeeding syndrome. When the resulting electrolyte imbalances paved the way for cardiac arrhythmias, he coded twice in the ICU. The care team managed to bring him back each time, but not without consequence; the brutality of numerous cycles of CPR left him with multiple rib fractures, inflicting him with sharp pain every breath.
It’s the proverbial question. Starting from the first time you utter an interest in medicine. Your parents, your friends, your mentors, your teachers, admissions committees — everyone asks you, “Why do you want to be a doctor?” This is not just a question you should think about before medical school, but one to revisit throughout your career.
It is not uncommon for transgender and gender non-binary individuals to be misgendered by health care providers or in the health care setting. This negatively affects their health and their relationship with their providers. Leaders in the field of transgender and non-binary health care recommend asking about a person’s pronouns and integrating pronoun introductions into the clinical setting.
Writer-in-Training
Boston University School of Medicine
Nat is a fourth-year medical student at Boston University School of Medicine in Boston Massachusetts, class of 2021. In 2017 they graduated from Hendrix College with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology. They will be applying into psychiatry this year and are currently interested in becoming a child and adolescent psychiatrist. Besides writing, in their free time they enjoy skateboarding, traveling, and trail running.
