1. The Other Side
By Anne Song, MD, Internal Medicine Residency Program

JAMA Network - Piece of My Mind
Publication Date: March 24, 2020

#Narrative_Medicine

🏷Description

A medicine resident describes her father’s vegetative state following a cardiac arrest and finds herself identifying with families who don’t want limitations on medical care for their loved ones in conflict with her identity as an internist.

📌From This Article

"...He withdraws his hands and feet to painful stimuli. But does he see me? Or feel me? Can he hear me? If you ask the doctor side of me, the answer is almost certainly no—but that does not stop me from FaceTiming him every day or asking my mom to transmit my never-ending kisses or telling him how much I love him and how much I miss him..."

"In medicine, we are called “to cure sometimes, to relieve often, and to comfort always.” For patients and families facing these decisions at the end of life, perhaps one of the greatest comforts we can offer is simply more time..."

How Technology changed the way we approach to patients & their sufferings

James Marcum, An Introductory to Philosophy of Medicine

#Cropped

2. Unintended Impacts of COVID-19 Social Distancing
By Dr. Thurka Sangaramoorthy, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland

BMJ - Medical Humanities
Publication Date: March 27, 2020

#Anthropology

📌From This Article

"... Many women continue to experience indifference and hostile rejection from family members, friends, co-workers, and intimate partners, who sometimes refuse to accept women’s HIV-diagnosis or blame them for their condition. Women often discussed how social distancing practices such as physical and social shunning left them feeling polluted, impure, and contagious."

"Ethically encumbered pandemic planning decisions such as those we face currently should involve more public engagement to improve public trust and public health outcomes. ..."

3. Becoming a Role Model
By Erica M. Carlisle

Johns Hopkins - Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics
Publication Date: Winter 2019

#NarrativeMedicine

🏷Description

A female pediatric surgeon shares her experiences of facing with sexist behaviors of his colleagues and people through her career as a physician.


📌From This Article

"...I explained that I was the trauma surgeon on call. After assisting the guard in lifting his jaw from the floor, I wondered whether a male surgeon would have been shouted after and forced to explain himself in such a manner. ..."

"... In each of these encounters, what worries me most is not the impact of these acts on my own psyche, but rather the impact that my responses have on the trainees that are in the room with me..."

4. What Constitutes Effective Team Communication After an Error?
By William M. Hart, MD et al.

AMA Journal of Ethics
Publication Date: April 2020

🏷Description:

Because errors tend to lead to complications, they often also lead to assignations of blame. When this happens, too often clinicians are at odds with each other about how to respond to a patient or a patient’s loved ones after that patient suffers harm. 


📌From This Article:

"...The disclosure of the complication to the family could depend on who is doing the disclosing. The surgeon could focus on the possibly ineffective resuscitation by the anesthesiologist and how that led to worsening intraoperative conditions and affected the recovery. At the same time, the anesthesiologist could point out that the main error was the ligation of the vein and that, if the surgeon had not made that mistake, the surgery and recovery would have progressed more smoothly."

"Disclosure is no longer viewed as an admission of guilt but instead as helping to build empathy among all parties and as reinforcing a commitment to patient safety and well-being. Along with their acceptance of apologizing to patients, health care organizations have emphasized full and complete error disclosure to patients."

"... Through coming together and addressing the problem as a team, clinicians can maintain the integrity of the medical system."

#MedicalError #Interprofessional_Relationship
#Patient_Professional_Relationship