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Overcoming Addiction In Residency & Fellowship
Dr. McKeown tells her story of battling, and overcoming, addiction in both residency and fellowship. She tells her story so that others struggling with addiction or substance abuse can know that they are not alone.
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How I Switched Residency Programs & Specialties
The Nitty-Gritty – how I switched career paths two-thirds of the way through a residency program and the questions I asked myself as I contemplated doing a second residency.
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Cumulative Trauma in Medicine
One of the biggest challenges with setting boundaries may be an unacknowledged internal drive to avoid those boundaries. We talked last time about challenging ideas of work as worth and about accepting that no amount of accomplishment can resolve empty feelings. You could pour a literal ocean into a cup with a hole in it…
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So You Want To Be a Sports Medicine Doctor?
Sports medicine, or more specifically primary care sports medicine (PCSM), is a field that is as rewarding as it is varied. Those in medicine will likely have heard the phrase “no two doctors have the same career.” The job of a general surgeon versus an OBGYN versus an emergency medicine physician are all completely different.…
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Challenging Ideas of Work as Worth
Much of our suffering comes from efforts to avoid suffering. Or, in the words of Carl Jung: “What we resist, persists.” Overwork can be one of the ways that we resist distressing emotions. Sometimes it can be harder to spot than other maladaptive coping mechanisms because work, and often overwork, tends to be praised and…
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Intimate Partner Violence in the Medical Community
Though this is frequently unacknowledged, physicians experience intimate partner violence (IPV) at a rate consistent with or higher than the national average (Reibling, et al., 2020). Some progress is being made, but there are still a number of significant barriers to reporting this experience. Physicians and other healthcare professionals may be reluctant to seek medical…
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Healthcare Advocacy in an Age of Turmoil
Healthcare workers will tell you that it is their job to, first and foremost, ensure that the health and wellbeing of their patients are at the highest levels possible. The general public, of course, wants to be healthy and have access to quality, affordable healthcare. Even (some) politicians want the same. Benjamin Disraeli, an English…
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Psychological Safety and Acknowledging Error
At first glance, healthcare teams that work well together seem to have higher rates of error. But when we dig just a bit deeper, we can see more accurately. In fact, teams in which there is a high degree of psychological safety are more willing to acknowledge error, paving the way for a continuous learning…
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Upstander Intervention in Bullying and Incivility
Bullying and incivility are serious issues in healthcare. These behaviors have been associated with distress, anxiety, posttraumatic reactions, medical errors, and even patient death. There are some effective strategies you can use if you are the target of bullying or incivility. And while they are less widely known, there are also some effective strategies you…
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Addressing Bullying in Healthcare
Bullying and incivility in healthcare do more than cause pain to the individuals experiencing them (although that pain alone is a significant issue). These disruptive behaviors have been linked to medical error by 71% of physicians and nurses surveyed, and to patient death by 27% of those professionals surveyed (Lewis, 2023). Using effective conflict resolution…
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Addressing Abuse of Power Dynamics in Medical School
Rethinking Residency spoke with Sierra Norman, a fourth year medical student and now activist working to change the culture of medical school and prevent the abuse of power directed at learners. We could tell immediately that Sierra was poised and confident, but that this was a difficult subject. She shared with us an incredibly personal…
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Conflict Resolution In Medicine
Conflicts are an inevitable part of human interaction. Whether the conflicts are addressed or hidden, acknowledged or denied, they are present in both our personal and professional lives. Although conflicts can be distressing, there is nothing inherently wrong with them. Conflict is not the same thing as bullying (bullying is bullying). Conflict by itself is…