http://www.studentdoctor.net/pandabearmd Navigating Medical School, Residency, and the Goat Rodeo that is American Medicine Fri, 23 Dec 2011 03:45:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Competition It's a rare Emergency Department that does not advertise some kind of thirty-minute-or-less guarantee and many even have electronic billboards flashing their current wait times into the night like a bug light to attract the casual seeker of late night medical care.   Because we have not yet taken complete ... http://www.studentdoctor.net/pandabearmd/2011/12/23/random-notes/ Left Without Being Fed Consider a typical fast food restaurant.  On any given day they are staffed to quickly and efficiently handle a certain number of customers and to this end do their employees, many working at the first job in their life, toil mightily.    It's hard work.  I've done ... http://www.studentdoctor.net/pandabearmd/2011/12/01/the-mcdonalds-paradox/ Wake Me When Our Society Collapses You've no doubt seen those annoying ads featuring smug, entitled Americans demanding in one lump sum the money owed to them for structured legal settlements because it's theirs and they want it now! Apparently we have become such a nation of legal parasites that it ... http://www.studentdoctor.net/pandabearmd/2011/11/18/jg-wentworth-and-the-hoveround-of-doom/ We Who Are About to Die I once worked at a hospital where every infraction of the rules was punished by death.  I was somewhat insulated from this because it is a little harder to replace a physician than that guy spooning pseudo-meat into my Chalupa but the nurses lived in ... http://www.studentdoctor.net/pandabearmd/2011/11/11/we-are-all-criminals-now/ Code Blue It will break your heart. Somebody's smartly-dressed, elegant grandmother is comatose.  Hadn't been to church.  Goes every Wednesday and Sunday.  Found in her kitchen in a puddle of vomit and stool, barely breathing. Had been healthy all her life.  Prognosis very poor.  In profound shock and admitted to the intensive ... http://www.studentdoctor.net/pandabearmd/2011/11/04/889/ Empty Suit How's that Hope and Change working for you?  Had enough?  Still grimly resisting that urge to scrape off the bumper sticker?  It's all right.  Nobody likes to admit they were fooled even though it's now painfully obvious that, like many of us warned you, The Sun King Ra-Obama is ... http://www.studentdoctor.net/pandabearmd/2009/12/17/prince-of-denmark/ Jumping the Shark "My arm was numb after I slept on it funny and my mom says I'm having a stroke," says my essentially healthy 34-year-old patient to the nodding approval of his indulgent mother sitting by the bed. "How long did the numbness last?" "A couple of minutes...it went away after I ... http://www.studentdoctor.net/pandabearmd/2009/11/21/money-for-nothing-healthcare-for-free/ Struggling for Rationality "This patient," I said to myself, "is going home."  I know.  She's 85 with the dreaded complaint of "Altered Mental Status" described by the family as a brief period of "staring."  No generalized seizure activity, you understand, and no syncope (fainting), slurring of speech, facial droop, drooling, weakness, confusion, ... http://www.studentdoctor.net/pandabearmd/2009/10/12/state-of-fear/ (More questions from real readers. -PB) What's the Emergency Department Really Like? The American College of Emergency Physicians and their bogus statistics notwithstanding, the majority of cases we see are not emergencies.   As I have mentioned before, most of the cases we see probably don't need to be seen at all by anybody in ... http://www.studentdoctor.net/pandabearmd/2009/09/05/yer-stinking-tax-dollars-at-work/ (Just a few random questions from real readers-PB) What is your job really like? As you know, I am an Emergency Physician working in a medium-sized community Emergency Department in a medium-sized hospital in a medium-sized city in a medium-sized state.   A "community" Emergency Department is not a major trauma center and ... http://www.studentdoctor.net/pandabearmd/2009/08/30/life-or-something-sorta-like-it/