""The hardest part for me is why am I doing the M.P.H. now? I'm going to need to spend the first part of my career doing another discipline just to pay off my loans. I think a lot of public-health people have the idealism that money's not going to be a factor." They would be wrong in assuming so."
The New Physician has a nice piece on medical student debt that hits a little close to home.
"Yes, I blew the whistle on Johns Hopkins Hospital's internal medicine residency for work-hours violations. Yes, I would do it again. But first, let me clarify a few things."
The New Physician has a piece written by the resident who report Johns Hopkin's IM program for work hour violations, along with a response from a Hopkins Senior Resident.
I spent today shadowing a very generous general internist in downtown Minneapolis and got to see and do some interesting things. The highlights/lowlights:
- we had to tell a patient that he/she probably had metastatic cancer
- I heard what a ball-type aortic valve replacement sounded like and correctly identified the patient as having systolic murmer.
- I took a history from a patient recovering from pneumonia, read the X-ray correctly (which is a big deal, since reading the simple chest X-ray is sort of like reading tea leaves), heard an expiratory wheeze, and nailed the diagnosis of bronchitis and suggested an appropriate treatment course.
What amazes me is how proficient the doctor was at moving from one patient to another, giving each his undivided attention as though that was the only patient he had to see that day, even if he just came from a very difficult case.
I had a follow-up conversation this afternoon with Gordon Mosser, M.D., Executive
Director of the Institute for Clinical Systems
Improvement. It seems there are numerous ways I can work though ICSI and
its member organizations to learn more about evidence-based medicine and systems-improvement,
including sitting in on an action group meeting, sitting in and/or participating
in a clincal guideline development group, or attach directly to a group that
does systems improvment work. The only question is to what degree I want to
get involved in this area of medicine. So we'll see what happens!
"A federal district judge in Washington on Thursday dismissed an antitrust lawsuit that contended medical residents are forced to participate in a system that ensures they work long hours for low wages."
On one hand, it's nice to know The Match will most likely still be around when it's time for me to apply to residencies; on the other hand, it's a little disappointing to think about the 10-years of post-high school education I will have gone through to work 80 hours/week making life and death decisions only make $40,000/year.
This week I spent the day in Dr. Ollila's general internal medicine clinic in downtown Minneapolis, which was a lot of fun. As is typical, we saw a former CEO of a major Minnesota company along with a mix of adults from age 40-80. The most interesting case was a guy who dislocated his shoulder, although the shoulder was still mostly functional and only slightly sore. Its amazing how very wrong even a suble abnormality looks after you spend hours in gross anatomy and hours learning the physical exam.
I re-created the Class of 2007 webpage, integrating a blog into the front page.
I spent a good deal of time this week helping with orientation - leading tours, speaking on a discussion panel, and taking a small group out to dinner. I also spent some time training my new Curriculum Liaison MS1 counterparts and making sure everything worked. Unfortunately, the Lectures Online server was hacked and then suffered some hardware failure, and as of Sunday is still not functional. But at least the anatomy course webpage I created seems to be perfectly functional.
I also put the finishing touches on my new webpage.
And finally, I received my new Palm Tungsten C from Overstock.com. I was a little afraid it wouldn't work out of the box, being an open box version, but everything worked great.
Welcome to my new webpage and web blog. Hope you enjoy its new look.