Month: September 2019
The Off-Service Resident’s Guide to the Surgical Rotation
By Natalie Tully, MD, MPH So, you find yourself a freshly minted doctor, headed off to Family Medicine, Urology, Radiology, or any other non-General Surgery residency, and yet here you sit stand through the 8th hour of a case that was posted as a 90 minute abdominal washout and wound vac exchange. How do you make time to study, and where do you even begin? Can you bathe in caffeine? Below are a few tips to help you navigate the weeks or months that you’ll be spending on service with us in surgery: 1. Educational Resources a. Medical Knowledge: Remember-this isn’t your primary field, and everyone around you should be cognizant of that. You should look for resources that will help you to gain what you need from the rotation 1. Quick Review: Fiser’s Review- Bullet points on major General Surgery Topics 2. Deeper Dives: Cameron’s Current Surgical Therapy-Lighter on...
When the job of your dreams, isn’t.
By Melissa Alvarez-Downing This time of year always brings me back to when I was starting a new job following fellowship training. After months of searching I’d found an opportunity close to home, with the promise of research and a busy clinical practice in my specialty. The opportunity was an ideal situation for me – or at least it seemed. However, several weeks after I started, a growing sense of apprehension slowly turned into a dreadful realization that my dream job, was in fact, not. While this was certainly not an overnight realization (I was there for nearly 4 years…), and hindsight is 20/20, there are three simple lessons I learned from that experience which I wish I had known beforehand. Advocate for yourself….from the beginning. We all are aware that women suffer from the “imposter syndrome” at a much higher rate than our equally trained male colleagues. However, countering...
A Stealth Misconception
By Monica Farrulla Five years have elapsed since I took the Hippocratic oath and was bestowed the highly-coveted “MD” (Medical Doctorate) to follow my name. In these years of training I have experienced an almost-immeasurable number of emotions and I have pushed my body to its physical limits. The medical profession is relentless and there is never a paucity of sick patients in need of help. Through it all, in spite of the not-so-good days, I have come home feeling privileged and honored to have helped, and if lucky, to have cured someone in need. After all, helping other people was my reason for becoming a physician. The other day while casually perusing through my Facebook, I came across a post from a co-resident who was responding to an article that spoke on the topic of medical profession and family planning. Intrigued by her strong reaction to this article, I...
Time Out: Optimizing Time Management as a Surgeon
By Kimberly Hoang “I am going to take a course on time management…. just as soon as I can work it into my schedule”. – Louis E. Boone As Mr. Boone and Einstein’s theory of relativity understand, time can be a tricky thing. It stands still when we are suffering through something we dislike, we lose it when we are doing something we enjoy, and there never seems to be enough of it. In an era of quantified metrics, time is also a measured commodity (in administrative speak: “time is money”). According to Sinsky et al, for every hour of patient care, a physician spends 2 hours doing paperwork. Ardnt et al also reported 5.9 hours of a 11.4 hour workday is spent on the electronic health record. The AMA’s 2014 Work/Life Profiles of Today Report that 25% of all physicians work 60-80 hours each week.When one reviews where our...
Ten Essential Lessons from a Senior Surgical Mentor
By Jaime D. Lewis One of the privileges that comes with working in academic medicine is caring for mentors and colleagues, those who make it their mission to pass along the wisdom and art of medicine. A recent experience caring for a mentor led me to reflect on lessons shared by this individual that have shaped my practice. There’s a lot of data out there and it’s impossible to know it all. This is absolutely okay! There are >390,000 “breast cancer” articles in PubMed. Learn to identify what may impact your practice, what is key for residents and medical students to know, and for patients to understand. Be able to communicate this information such that others can understand your message.Know the history of the management of the disease process. Be intimately familiar with the groundbreaking studies that have changed the course of clinical care. Question their ongoing validity as these...