Month: June 2019
Egg Freezing Facts for Female Physicians
By Anu Kathiresan As women in medicine, we are always focused on the next goal we need to achieve to advance our career. Though undergraduate education, medical school, residency, and fellowship, we are constantly striving to get the highest score, to maintain a high GPA, to publish papers, to get excellent letters of recommendation. The challenge that women physicians face is balancing these demands in the midst of our passing prime reproductive years. We plan a trajectory of our career from an early stage, sometimes as early as our undergraduate years. But do we have the same foresight about an equally important part of our life journey: planning for a family? Infertility affects 1 in 8 couples in the general population, however infertility affects 1 in 4 women physicians. There is never a good time to have a family in our training years or in our early post-training years for...
Fail Better
By Anne Mongiu This unexpected invitation to write a post for AWS coincided with an equally unexpected phone call from my closest friend from medical school. She had resigned from her rather substantial clinical and academic appointments, and the conversation began with, “Anne, I’m a failure…”. I happen to have expertise in this area. My first memorable taste of failure came in the 6th grade. I scored 20 points lower than the 1200 needed on the SATs in order to spend the summer studying at Duke. I was devastated. As an only child of two first generation Americans with little education and no financial resources, academic excellence was my ticket to a different future. Up to that point, I had succeeded in school with little effort. But that failure marked the day that I began to truly study and prepare, knowing that my unseen competitors were formidable. The next 25...
The “Public Health Approach” – What Does It Mean?
By Stephanie Bonne Who remembers the public health class you took in medical school? More likely than not it was a pass/fail class, maybe a couple of credit hours, that was taught at 4pm on a Thursday. Do you remember what you learned? For those of us without formal training, like an MPH or similar degree, we might not be able to describe what it really means to “take a public health approach” to a problem. This has come to my attention recently in the corner of the world that I work. As a trauma surgeon interested in injury prevention, violence prevention and gun violence, my research and nonclinical interest lives in a highly charged political environment. I frequently hear politicians, advocates, and even peers calling for “us” (society) to take “a public health approach.” So what does that mean? If 20 people lock themselves in conference room until they...
Dear Intern
By Melissa Herrin When I first considered writing a blog titled #DearIntern, my instinct was that I should be the last person giving advice. Everyone around me seemed to be gliding through residency confidently and with capabilities I was lacking. However, it occurred to me that my struggles probably weren’t unique, and challenge begets learning and strength. Thus, I write this in hopes that my reflections can provide you the same. Dear Intern: You’re stronger than you think. You’re meant to be here, a surgeon. Remember that you earned your residency position by what many would classify as superhuman achievements. These sentences are easy to write, but they are very tough to remember and believe. That’s why I’m telling you now. My college rowing teammates and I would encourage each other through difficult workout intervals, “You can do anything for a minute.” This may sound irrelevant as shifts last hours...
Remember: You’re Strong enough!
The AWS blog is thrilled to recognize the experience and accomplishments of women surgeons around the world. While women surgeons share many common experiences, we differ in our cultural norms, support for women in careers and expectations of women in society around the world. One of the goals of AWS is to support women internationally, and part of that recognition is to build cultural understanding and awareness of the barriers women face in countries outside the United States. We would like to congratulate Dr. Spinoit on her incredible accomplishment - recently becoming the first female professor of surgery in Belgium, and hope to see increasing numbers of women rising through academic and clinical ranks into leadership worldwide. By Anne-Françoise Spinoit I was born in a family where medicine, and especially surgery, was always present. Many family members are surgeons or perform medical-related jobs. As far back as I can remember,...
Crisis Pregnancy Centers: Legal but Ethical?
By Nickey Jafari Perhaps you have already heard of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs). I see highway billboards for them on most of my long drives throughout the rural midwest. I recently received an email from a student interest group offering medical students to tour them. The first CPC opened in the 1960s, but they have since ballooned to far outnumber abortion clinics, and unlike abortion clinics, they can and often receive public funding. CPCs present themselves to women as healthcare facilities, but they are often unlicensed and unregulated. Certain U.S. cities, like Austin and Baltimore, and states, like California, have attempted to combat this with their own measures, such as requiring unlicensed CPCs to simply disclose the fact that they are unlicensed, but a recent Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that such laws infringe on First Amendment rights. Furthermore, we should be concerned that CPCs often share misleading or outright inaccurate...