Bon Ku, MD, MPP is an emergency medicine physician and associate professor at Thomas Jefferson University. He teaches design thinking to medical students as a co-director of the design track at Jefferson’s medical school. This track, called “College within a College—Design,” launched this year with fifteen students.
Kathy Nieder, MD began her career as a family medicine doctor in 1984. She became interested in social media as a tool for healthcare in 2011 and has been blogging at Family Practice 2.0 and actively using other sites, particularly Twitter, to stay abreast of
In my last post, I discussed points brought up by Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD, and John Ioannidis, MD, about research in medicine. The takeaway was that students are strongly incentivized to do research during their training, but those incentives don’t necessarily reward high-quality work. Furthermore, they don’t directly contribute
It is a truism of American medical education that students should do research. Stanford medical school’s website espouses a “strong commitment to student research,” because it makes us “valued members of any medical field.” A similar message can be found at almost any other institution.
There are some pieces of journalism that are so gut-wrenching that they can have immediate effects. The recent investigative series on the terrible conditions of nails salons that came out in the New York Times, for example, was so horrific that it caused the governor of New York to, within 3
Jennifer Joe, MD, is a Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) nephrology graduate turned physician entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Founder of Medstro.com, an innovative social network for physicians. Dr. Joe founded Medstro and its sister site MedTech Boston (a site
Akhilesh Pathipati is a second-year medical student at the Stanford School of Medicine. He is originally from Sacramento, California, and graduated from Harvard College in 2013. While in medical school, Akhilesh has published articles in the Sacramento Bee and the Stanford Scope Blog. Here, Akhilesh
Internist William Osler (1849-1919), one of the founders of Johns Hopkins Hospital, is often considered a founding father of modern medical education due to his creation of the first clinical clerkship and residency programs for medical trainees. He is also one of the most quoted physicians. This article
Dr. James Legan has practiced internal medicine at his office in Great Falls, Montana (a town of under 60,000 people) for 22 years. Within the last year, he has rediscovered a love of painting. This has led him to paint portraits of his parents, profiles of
In a recent interview I read in the Harvard Gazette, poetry professor Helen Vendler discusses her inspiration for becoming an expert on poetry. Vendler was the first woman to be named a University Professor at Harvard. Much of her inspiration for studying poetry, it turns out, comes from
To my doe-eyed high school self, “research” was a term thrown around in ivy-covered college admissions tours, nightly news reports, and the wellness section of the Times. I imagined pipettes, fluorescently lit blobs of green appearing in petri dishes and evoking “Eureka!” moments, and the
Many aspects of medicine have changed over the course of human history. Schools of thought shifted from humorism to evidence-based medicine, while the standard of care evolved from bleeding to our modern cornucopia of interventions. Yet across centuries, the doctor-patient relationship has remained relatively constant
The social media network for physicians and medical students, Medstro, is holding a “The Joy of Medicine Challenge” in partnership with the healthcare technology company Geneia to find innovative solutions to combat burnout in medicine. They are asking physicians and medical students to pitch creative solutions to restore
In his recent article arguing for the importance of an education in the humanities, New York Times Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof says that liberal arts are needed to guide the most practical, rational, logical discoveries of science and technology in the right direction. He writes
I read through all five parts of physician Robert Wachter’s article on Medium, “How Medical Tech Gave a Patient a Massive Overdose.” In it, Wachter chronicles the steps of oversight and technology-enabled errors that prompted a nurse to give a pediatric patient at UCSF Children’s Hospital 38.5 times
I came across this post, “Wild, Crazy, and Creative Doctors” that lists some examples of how creative doctors have improved their practices. My favorite are the most simple ones, like this: “Marshall Zaslove, MD, a physician productivity expert, advises doctors to have a nurse follow