Tag: medical student wellness

Nita Chen, MD (39 Posts)

Medical Student Editor and in-Training Staff Member Emeritus

University of Florida Fixel Movement and Neurorestoration Institute

Nita Chen is a current movement disorders fellow at University of Florida Movement and Neurorestoration program. She is Class of 2017 medical student at Albany Medical College. To become cultural, she spent her early educational years in Taiwan and thoroughly enjoyed wonderful Taiwanese food and milk tea, thus ruining her appetite for the rest of her life in the United States. Aside from her neuroscience and cognitive science majors during her undergraduate career, she holed herself up in her room writing silly fictional stories, doodling, and playing the piano. Or she could be found spazzing out like a gigantic science nerd in various laboratories. Now she just holes up in her room to study most of the time.

Dishing Out Those Inner Demons: Finding Strength in the Medical Student Community

Published by Nita Chen, MD

Sometimes, I wonder why I am here. Walking this path of medicine, to be specific. It always fascinated me what drove people in life. For some, the joy of spinning creative fabrics of fictional words satisfied; for some, raising and guiding children through the thorns of life serves as the pinnacle of existence; for others, the simple necessities of life and health are solely sufficient. For medical students, I feel like this can be a …

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 …

How Medical School Taught Me to Put Studying Second

Published by Samuel Scott

You know you have a problem when you can’t fall asleep at night. That’s where I was nearing at the end of anatomy in my first year of medical school. I couldn’t sleep because I was terrified of what the next day held. My sympathetic nervous system was on full alert, ready to handle the next day. The only thing between the next day and me was a night of sleep that seemed harder and …

Samar

Published by Annie Robinson

How can the ways doctors-in-training evolve as individuals during medical school impact their patients? Samar, a fourth-year medical student and health coach with a passion for patient education and preventive medicine, realized that her personal self-care practices—healthy eating, yoga, exercise and gratitude—not only help her get through school but also contribute to what she can offer her patients on their healing journeys.

Happiness Within: Work-Life Imbalance

Published by Andrew Petersen

From the first day of medical school orientation, we have been advised to maintain a life outside of the walls of the hospital and to continue our own hobbies and interests. This often feels overwhelming among the endless classes, exams, clerkships and applications, not to mention extracurricular activities. We all want to be a model medical student, battling our desires to be a good friend, husband, wife and person. I find medicine to be an …

Med School Got You Down?

Published by Shamini Parameswaran

It’s that time of the year again. For second-years, USMLE Step 1 is around the corner. For third-years, it’s Step 2. For fourth-years, their future careers are just months away. At times, the pressure of medical school looms and the daily challenges that students face become disheartening. That’s why I like to be reminded of short stories of people who did not necessarily go through medical school, but were faced with many hardships. Some were …

Yoga and Medicine: What Med Students Should Know About this Ancient Health Practice

Published by Jennie Barnes

Why should future physicians know about yoga? Yoga is an ancient health science based on the experimental and experiential. The physical postures and meditative practices of yoga developed through thousands of years of intent study of the body’s responses to particular postures and meditations. Many patients have already caught on to yoga as a form of mental and physical self-care and preventive health. If we adequately understand yoga, we can seize an opportunity to encourage the …

Running Out of Gas, Burning Out, and Extinguishing Oneself

Published by Jennifer Evan

Today I was told that, because of the profession I have chosen, I am at a high risk for suicide. And so commences the medical ethics portion of medical school. While this was not the line with which the lecture began — which I’m sure would have evoked terror in most of the stern-faced-but-wide-eyed first-years that faced the front of the room — it was stated directly and at point-blank, roughly halfway through the introductory …

Stress Management in Medicine

Published by Paul Thomas

Editor’s note: This article was originally published here by contributing writer Paul Thomas. Stress in medicine is a topic that often comes up in the medical literature, in the popular press and in our own interpersonal experiences. But what does stress management look like for a young physician in training? And what are large health systems doing to promote stress management among their employees? This week, I had the good fortune of attending a one-hour session on …

Barriers to Mindfulness in Med School

Published by Nicole Perkes

The life of a medical student is a rapid succession of lectures, small group sessions, exams, clinical experiences, workshops, meetings, eat, sleep, rinse and repeat. As such, there has never been a more perfect time to stop and smell the roses. Seriously. As described in the blossoming literature, mindfulness techniques quite literally offer the opportunity to stop, breath, and take in the present moment -– roses, exams and all. Mindfulness is the nonjudgmental observation and …

Defining Mindfulness in Med School

Published by Nicole Perkes

Listen carefully and you may hear the whispers that mindfulness is becoming yet another buzzword in medicine, following in the steps of “cultural competency,” “narrative medicine,” and the like. It is trendy among its niche and it is being compelled into the curriculum of med schools across Canada and the United States in the hopes of creating a generation of physicians who haven’t burnt out by their ten-year reunions. Yeah, I’ve heard of mindfulness, but what is it, really? …

Does My ASIS Look Big in This White Coat?

Published by Kevin Fairbairn

Over the course of our Nutrition, Growth & Development block, I thought it might be a good idea to start looking into what I’ve been putting into my body on a daily basis during medical school. As a result, I settled on using the My Fitness Pal app as a diet tracker (this is by no means a product endorsement — I have not received funding nor do I have any conflicts of interests, aside from the …

Kevin Fairbairn (1 Posts)

Contributing Writer Emeritus

University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine

Glitter is underused in all facets of life.