Tomorrow is our team’s second major admission day; we’ll receive eight patients plus a possible ICU transfer. While having new patients on the service is great, these tend to be our longest days… and the Texans are playing their second playoff game tomorrow. Last week’s admission day was Saturday… when…
I almost forgot how rigorous hospital medicine can be, but being back on the wards has been a much-needed reminder why I went into this profession. It’s also fun watching the MS2s (who just started clinical rotations a week ago!) present patients on rounds; it feels like yesterday when I…
What a return to the clinical scene! Although my upper-level resident is switching, I’ve gotten to know the two MS2s and two interns I’ll be working with for the next four weeks. I couldn’t be happier with this group!
All fourth year medical students are required to complete a one month sub-internship (sub-I) in internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, or family medicine. Compared to core rotation students who focus more on interviewing patients, doing physical exams, and synthesizing assessments/plans, sub-I students perform the aforementioned in addition to other aspects of…
The VA hospital was an amazing way to end my internal medicine experience, mainly because of how extraordinary my team and attending were! As a parting gift, the VA graciously bestowed me with a nasty case of the common cold right before my shelf exam. I struggled to study on…
The overwhelming majority of the patients I’ve encountered on the wards have diabetes mellitus (DM). While there are countless ways to manage DM as an outpatient (insulin injections, biguanides, sulfonylureas, etc.), sliding scale insulin (SSI) seems to be the most routinely used method of controlling blood glucose (BG) for hospital…
There’s a well known stereotype that doctors have incredibly poor handwriting. While I accepted this “rumor” to be true, I’ve verified it first hand by working at St. Luke’s where all the notes are handwritten.
Benjamin Franklin is credited with once saying “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” Such is the state of modern healthcare. We all want costs to go down, but how have we actually changed our approach to managing patients? Medical…
On the first day of orientation for internal medicine (IM), the faculty noted that they now have statistical evidence which supports the notion that students who start on IM tend to do better on all their subsequent rotations. Why? The reasons are up for debate, but halfway through the rotation,…
Six weeks of internal medicine done. Six weeks left. *Sighs* It seems that each step in my training to become a physician passes at a progressively faster rate. What’s worrisome is that the shelf exam is in six weeks, and I’m not even halfway through my main prep book. It’s…