A blog about the inner workings of the field of medicine and its theoretical, practical, and ethical complexities.
By: Aaron Rothstein
April 9, 2015
What would you do if you only had three years left to live? I remember, in middle school, discussing a version of this question with my friends. Sometimes we presented each other with a timeline of three weeks, sometimes just three days, but the scenarios all had similar preconditions: you have no obligations and it doesn’t matter if...
March 23, 2015
As I look back on the first year of this blog and reflect on my four years of medical school, I am amazed at how much I have learned and how much I have seen. All of it has informed what I have written about here on Practicing Medicine. And many of the issues I have raised remain vital to my experience within the hospital. Medicine...
March 16, 2015
The problem of physician burnout, which in a previous post I defined as a “loss of enthusiasm for work, feelings of cynicism, and a low sense of accomplishment,” increasingly plagues the American medical profession. In an article in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2012, researchers found that U.S. physicians suffer more burnout...
February 25, 2015
I remember reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes detective stories as a child. I tore through each page of each book, relishing Holmes’s crime-fighting abilities and dreaming that I could replicate them. I even would have settled for the opportunity to work alongside Holmes like his loyal ally Dr. Watson, sharing in...
February 12, 2015
Dmitrijs Bindemanis via Shutterstock One morning, I checked in on an 82-year-old female who was admitted overnight after falling in her home. She looked like any other elderly woman: gray hair, thin legs and arms, and wrinkled skin. Yet she lacked the frailty and exhaustion that sick older people often exhibit and wore a faint smirk —...
January 15, 2015
Reactions to mental illnesses or disorders vary. (I wrote about some of them in a 2012 essay in the pages of The New Atlantis.) I’ve noticed, however, that some of the responses among physicians differ from their reactions to other medical pathologies. There are several reasons why this might be the case, having to do with the fact...
December 9, 2014
O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. —William Blake, “The Sick Rose” As I rotate through psychiatry, I have noticed that certain facial features and dispositions uniquely characterize diseases. I...
November 24, 2014
Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God, God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on ’t, ah fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed. Things rank and...
November 18, 2014
Physicians throw around the term “evidence-based medicine” a lot. Whether it’s an antibiotic, IV fluid, or blood-pressure pill, the decision about how to use a drug often comes down to the question: is the treatment evidence-based? But what does that mean? Evidence-based medicine is “the conscientious, explicit, and...
November 3, 2014
I can’t think of a more awkward social situation for a single, twenty-six-year-old male to be in. A previous experience as the only Jew in a room full of Catholics singing songs about Jesus didn’t hold a candle to this. I was observing a group of fifteen pregnant women discussing pregnancy and getting pregnancy screening tests. Nurse...