You’ve made it! You’ve slogged through the internship, residency and maybe even a fellowship to be the top dog. Numero uno. The alpha and omega. You are now an attending. The buck stops with you. All responsibility lies with you. Everyone comes to you for answers. You make all the big decisions. Are you ready? Of course not. Just a few days or weeks ago you were finishing your training, still leaning on your own […]
Medicine Mondays
After the long journey that is intern year, you have now arrived. The 1st day of your 2nd year of residency you are no longer the most dangerous person in the hospital. Congratulations. However… with great power comes great responsibility. As a junior resident, you are in a unique “balancing act”. You will be the closest to all the interns, but still somewhat far-removed from the attending, which is usually reserved for upper-level residents, chief […]
How to be a Good Resident
Let’s talk about How to be a Good Intern. The first thing to understand as an intern… is that just about everyone else in the hospital has more experience/knowledge than you. That makes you the most dangerous person in the hospital. You need to be aware of your inherent limitations. At no time during your first year should you ever have no “back-up”. There should be always someone who you can call. Whether that is […]
How to be a Good Intern
So you’ve gone through your core clinical rotations as a 3rd year and now you need to think about choosing a specialty. You’ve done some rotations in the specialties you thought you might have liked, and they were.. ok. Perhaps you’ve even done the medical specialty aptitude test or something similar. None of that matters. You need to do some heavy introspection before you choose your specialty, and no one can tell you what fits you… […]
Choosing a Specialty
As a doctor, you have now firmly ingrained yourself in an honorable profession… with a ton of red tape. Somewhere in the mess that is your life during and after residency you will hear the term “credentialing”. This is the bane of all physicians everywhere, which becomes exponentially harder the more jobs you have, and more places you have been or are currently credentialed at. Now, what exactly is “credentialing”? At its core, it’s a doctor […]
“The File”
Doctors are usually viewed as infallible beings… which is patently false. Having gone through the majority of our lives striving to be the best and continually trying to be correct and trying our hardest to make no mistakes… it hits us even harder when we are incorrect or make a mistake. We are only human. However, we forget this many more times than we remember. During the course of your residency and your career you will make mistakes. For many, […]