Tag Archives: ACP

Medicine:  Science + Humanity = Professional Pride

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Lots of learning this month, friends.  I’m overwhelmed and overjoyed, and proud of my profession.

It’s too much to write about in one post, but I will try all the same, in order of occurrence.

18 October 2019

Once again I had the privilege of meeting with medical students, this time to discuss their experience of leadership in medicine.  As is my new custom, I started with an appreciative inquiry exercise: What is the best thing about medicine, WHY do you do this?  One of their responses:

“The medical encounter is a unique combination of compassion and intellect—the conversation is my favorite thing, and that I also get to help.”

19 October 2019

Looking through the basement bookshelf, I came across my medical school application from 1994.  The general application included a one page personal statement, in which I wrote:

“Science, and the human body in particular, have always fascinated me… In practice, while I pursue the challenge of each new patient’s illness, I want to share with them my enthusiasm for the science of medicine…  But being a doctor involves more than curing people’s illnesses…  It is the job of the physician to reassure and comfort the patient…  In my practice I will…do my best to communicate with (patients) in terms they will accept.  The best way to comfort people is to relate to them.  I believe this skill will make me understand not only patients’ medical needs, but their emotional and psychological needs as well…  I hope to keep learning from my patients in the future.”

Turns out I’ve been both a science nerd, and also thinking and writing about relationships and connection for a while now, go figure.

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25-26 October 2019

This year’s ACP Illinois Chapter Meeting was the best one in recent years, in my humble opinion.  I’m so proud that under the leadership of our Northern Region Governer, Dr. Suja Mathew, we were able to present a robust clinical education conference, as is the ACP tradition.  Along with sessions on diabetes, heart failure, office orthopaedics, and cancer survivorship, however, we also included sessions on critical social and public health issues, such as diversity/inclusion, the impact of social media, firearm injury and death, medical marijuana, trauma-informed care, and sexual harassment in the workplace.  Esteemed colleagues from across the country came to share their expertise.  Here are just a few examples of Science + Humanity, in action every day in our work:

Diabetes

Science:  We now understand that it’s the wide swings in blood sugar, and especially very low sugar, that lead to end organ damage.  We have new classes of drugs with novel mechanisms of action.  They decrease the burden of glucose control on pancreas cells, and also seem to prevent heart failure in some patients.  Humanity:  All diabetic patients need education—face to face time with a trained professional who can teach them about the disease and how to manage it. Even the most highly educated and most well-informed person cannot automatically know how to be a diabetes patient without the help of these medical team members.  More and more, diabetes care in particular is a team sport, and our collective skills get better every year.

Cancer

Science: We are curing cancer.  There are more survivors now than ever before, thanks to targeted genetic and immunotherapy and minimally invasive surgery, among other treatments.  Humanity:  Survivorship starts at the time of diagnosis, and cancer patients have both unique and diverse needs and concerns.  Complications from treatment such as neuropathy and heart failure can occur years out from treatment, and the psychosocial consequences for patients and their families can be lasting and transformative.  The better we understand this as their care teams, the healthier and happier our patients will be.

Childhood Trauma

Science: Since the 1970s, cumulative evidence shows that Adverse Childhood Experiences and trauma correlate with an increased risk of negative health behaviors, mental illness, chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, decreased academic performance, limited professional productivity, and early death.  And they appear to affect each of these outcomes independently.  In the Tree of ACEs, branches and leaves represent the interpersonal experiences.  We are only starting to understand the roles played by Adverse Collective Historical Events (slavery, genocide, mass incarceration, forced displacements)—the soil, and Adverse Community Environments (poverty, violence)—the roots.  Humanity:  The key factor that correlates with escape from the early mortality path from ACEs is a stable and nurturing relationship with an adult caregiver.  As healthcare providers, we have a unique and important part to play in the healing of all ACEs—our patients’ and our own—and all evidence points to the quality of our patient-provider relationships as foundation—no surprise.

Gun Violence

Science: In 2012 33,000 people died from firearm injuries (it was up to 40,000 in 2018); 62% of these deaths were suicides.  That same year there were 62,000 nonfatal firearm injuries, 72% of which were assault, 5% self-inflicted, and 17% unintentional.  Higher rates of gun ownership correlate with higher rates of death from firearm injuries.  States with both background checks and waiting periods have lower rates of suicide by firearm compared to those with background checks only.  It is still unclear whether states with more lax concealed carry laws have different rates of firearm related deaths compared to stricter states.  Humanity: Though mass shootings dominate the media, the majority of deaths from firearms are self-inflicted.  The acute impulsivity of mental illness, combined with an accessible, loaded firearm, destroys lives—whole families and communities at a time.  Our job as physician advocates is to not alienate gun owners, and rather enroll and recruit their help to address the factors that take our friends and loved ones from us.  It’s not an Us vs. Them fight over rights.  It’s a shared challenge to create policy that honors our unique national history and culture, and also effectively addresses our public health crises.  Here is where our highest notions of collaboration, respect, and shared purpose must be exercised.

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27-30 October 2019

Today I arrived in San Diego for the International Conference on Communication in Healthcare, my first time at this meeting.  Many of the sessions will present research on effective ways to teach communication skills to trainees, factors that impact health literacy, and methods for measuring effective communication.  This conference is all about the science of communication in healthcare.  And it’s also about the humanity.  The first plenary speaker was Dr. Lisa Fitzpatrick, who interviews people on the streets of DC in her series, “Dr. Lisa on the Street.”  The videos show over an over how people feel ignored and dismissed by our healthcare system, and how unsafe it is for them to admit what they don’t know or ask questions.  This is one of the only meetings I have attended at which patients are invited to present and voice their perspective.  At the end of this session one patient attendee stood up and spoke words that will guide me throughout this week and my career:  “Doctors may have all the education in the world, and if you cannot talk to your patients in a way that makes them trust you, it really doesn’t matter.”

Sessions I plan to attend:

Moving Health Care from a Team of Experts to an Expert Team

How to Become an Effective Advocate for Humanism in Your Healthcare Organization

Collaboration and Communication Across Multidisciplinary Healthcare Teams

Civility Ninjas:  A Field Guide to Improving Colleague-Colleague Interactions

Understanding and Addressing Mistrust

Shared Decision-Making as Ethical Practice

Thanks for reading to the end, friends.  I know it was a lot.  As I age I learn to hold patience as well as eagerness, absorbing the input as well as creating my own, integrated outputs for good.  How lucky I am to have so many amazing people to keep me company on the journey!

Four days to NaBloPoMo, my fifth attempt, HOLY COW!  Better get to bed…

Reconnecting to Mission, Patients, and Colleagues

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What’s the most personally fulfilling aspect of your work?  In times of uncertainty, threat, and transition, what holds you up?

This past week, I had the privilege of standing alongside giants in the fight against physician burnout.  In a series of presentations at the annual meeting of the American College of Physicians (ACP), we did our best to acknowledge and validate the current state of physician burnout (about half of all physicians in all specialties report at least one symptom), and then present as many strategies to reduce it as time would allow.  We showed how changes in workflow, task distribution, and technology, such as pre-visit labs and scribes, have been shown to improve physician satisfaction, team morale, and patient experience.  My role was to attempt to inspire my fellow internists to claim their individual agency, model a culture of wellness, and advocate for systems change in their home institutions.

The content felt dense but manageable, and the audience appeared engaged.  Our colleagues from all around the country approached us afterward to clarify studies of efficacy and ask about local representatives for advocacy in the ACP.  In the end, I think we achieved our primary objective of having most attendees leave with just a little more hope for our profession than they came in with.

Over the four day conference, however, what consistently grounded me in professional mission and meaning, not only in our own presentation but in others, were the personal stories.  That is how we humans relate to one another, after all—through narratives.  And connecting to mission and colleagues is key to maintaining a healthy and productive workforce, physician or otherwise.

Our attendees participated in two practices that I’ll share here.  Both were “Pair and Share” activities, meant to stimulate reflection both internally and externally.

Who In Your Life Really Changed You?

First we asked our colleagues to think of a patient who changed them, how, and to what end.  I know there have been many patients who changed me, but I always think of one particular woman.  She was middle aged, obese, diabetic, depressed, and severely disabled from osteoarthritis.  She lived alone and had a sparse social network, and her life partner had died unexpectedly a few years before I met her.  At every visit we struggled through the same fundamental challenges of weight loss, glucose control, and pain management.  How could she take her diabetes medications more regularly?  How could we control her pain without having to take opioids every day?  How else could we manage her depression, as some of the medications were raising her blood sugar?  She may have cried at almost every visit; wailing was not uncommon, and once she even vomited from cumulative distress.  Our relationship was good overall.  I overcame my impatience with her non-adherence to the treatment plan as I understood her life situation better.  But for four of the five years we knew each other, I saw few if any indicators that her thought, emotional, and behavior patterns would change.

Then things started to turn around.  She started coming consistently to appointments, no more no-shows.  She got online and found a community center that was accessible by bus.  She connected with a knitting group and started going to art fairs to sell her creations.  She started taking her medications more regularly, and lost enough weight to have her knee replaced.  By the time we parted ways, she had transformed from a weeping victim of circumstance to a woman with agency, self-efficacy, and goals, dammit!  And most of this had nothing to do with me.  I simply had the privilege to witness and support her intrinsic revolution.  From her I learned what perseverance looks like; I learned about hope and self-redemption; I learned that I should never make assumptions about anybody’s future.

Who Supported You in a Time of Vulnerability?

They said do the hardest thing that you know you don’t want to do for a living as your first rotation.  So I chose surgery.  In July of my third year of medical school, my days started around 5:30am and could end the next night at 10pm if my team was busy post call.  Most faculty physicians were kind and wise, or at least non-abusive.  Some, however, not so much.  What buoyed me most through that rotation was always the support and protection of the residents on my team.  I would watch them get abused by our attendings, but that sh*t never rolled downhill when the boss left the room.  I did not fully realize until years later what a gift that was and how much it spoke to the character of these men (they were all men).  This was in the 1990s; verbal abuse of medical students and snide comments about one’s appearance, gender, and just about everything else were simply to be expected.  But my favorite residents always pulled me aside and asked how I was.  They always made sure I felt confident about my role on the team, and they taught me basic skills with conviction and encouragement.  As I was about to insert a patient’s bladder catheter in the operating room, my elder brother in training told me firmly, like he really believed I could do it, “Don’t be afraid, hold it (the penis) like a hose.”

As we did this reflection exercise at the meeting last Wednesday along with our audience, I was so moved by these memories that I looked up one of my old residents that night and sent him a thank you card.  I bet he won’t remember at all who I am, but he will hopefully feel validated that he is in exactly the right position now as program director of a surgery residency.

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Recalling stories like these, and then sharing them with a person who truly listens, receives them generously, and simply helps you hold them (that was the instruction to the group—when it’s your turn to listen just do that, no interruptions, no jumping in), reconnects us to our calling in medicine.  It’s not just about the patients or the science.  It’s about all of the relationships and how we tend them.

We will not solve the immensely complex problem of physician burnout overnight.  It will take a concerted effort at all levels of healthcare, and physicians cannot and will not do it alone.  And it’s not that we are stoic, arrogant, and somehow intrinsically flawed, and thus dissatisfied with our work and leaving the profession in record numbers.  It is a systems problem, no question.  And, while we call our congressional leaders and professional advocacy groups to change policy, while we lobby our hospital administration to hire more support staff and move the printers closer to where we do our work, we can all take a few minutes each day and reconnect to the core meaning and purpose in that work.  Let us all remember a cool story and share it today.

Running Strong In Our Lane

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NaBloPoMo 2018:  What I’m Learning

So the NRA tweets, “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves.”

Hmmm, self-important.  Yes, sometimes.  After four years of college, four years of medical school, up to seven years of residency and then another 3 years of fellowship to earn the privilege of operating on the spines, nerves, organs, and blood vessels of gunshot victims, to maybe give them a chance to stay alive much less walk and talk, I can tolerate a little (just a little) self-importance in my emergency medicine, neurosurgery, trauma surgery, critical care and other colleagues.  They are f*ing rock stars.

Anti-gun.  I have yet to meet any physician, or any person, really, who is wholly anti-gun.  We are pro-gun safety, anti-violence by guns.  We would like for toddlers to not kill their siblings and parents by accident.  We would like for domestic disputes to not escalate to someone shooting their family and then themselves in an impulsive fit of rage.  We would like for depressed and suicidal patients not to actually kill themselves, which is too much easier to do with a firearm than any other method.  We just want to stop being the only country where so many die every year from being shot by guns.

The American College of Physicians (ACP), the internal medicine professional society and my home for professional communion and development, and the largest medical specialty organization, has published an updated position paper on reducing firearm deaths in the US:

In 2015, 9 (the ACP) joined the American College of Surgeons, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, American Public Health Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Emergency Physicians, and American Bar Association in a call to action to address gun violence as a public health threat, which was subsequently endorsed by 52 organizations that included clinician organizations, consumer organizations, organizations representing families of gun violence victims, research organizations, public health organizations, and other health advocacy organizations (2). Yet, firearm violence remains a problem—firearm-related mortality rates in the United States are still the highest among high-income countries (3).

Cited in their tweet, the NRA Institute for Legislative Action posted an article (no author identified) picking apart the ACP’s research citations and approach, stating, “This position paper leaves one wondering if the authors reviewed the evidence, or just found works that suited their needs. For all of the bluster about their own important role in the anti-gun movement and all of the misuse of research findings, the ACP makes one thing clear: they respect their own rights and opinions far more than they do those of law-abiding gun owners.”  *sigh*  As I have not read the primary literature on gun mortality and public health myself, I will not comment on that here.  I will just say that I wholeheartedly trust in the integrity of my colleagues and leaders at the ACP.  I’m proud of our advocacy for patients and, more recently, for physicians ourselves and our well-being.

My physician colleagues have posted a multitude of passionate responses on Twitter; you can read them here, here, and here.  And I just now saw this open letter to the NRA from the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine (AFFIRM) and signed it.  Below are highlights—please take a look.

I admit, I initially responded with profanity at seeing the NRA tweet.  My threshold for swearing is very low these days.  And I wanted to just post screenshots of the anti-NRA tweet storm and let them speak for me.  But that’s not me. I have yet to really decide how I want to design my public platform and conduct on issues like this.  For now, I can just say that tweets and articles like the NRA posted are disappointing.  I don’t want to follow that lead.

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Dear National Rifle Association,

On Wednesday night (11/7/2018), in response to a position paper released by the American College of Physicians (ACP) Reducing Firearm Injuries and Death in the United States, your organization published the statement “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane.”

On that same day, the CDC published new data indicating that the death toll from gun violence in our nation continues to rise. As we read your demand for us doctors to stay in our lane, we awoke to learn of the 307th mass shooting in 2018 with another 12 innocent lives lost to an entirely preventable cause of death–gun violence.

Every medical professional practicing in the United States has seen enough gun violence firsthand to deeply understand the toll that this public health epidemic is taking on our children, families, and entire communities.

It is long past time for us to acknowledge the epidemic is real, devastating, and has root causes that can be addressed to assuage the damage. We must ALL come together to find meaningful solutions to this very American problem.

We, the undersigned – physicians, nurses, therapists, medical professionals, and other concerned community members – want to tell you that we are absolutely “in our lane” when we propose solutions to prevent death and disability from gun violence.

Our research efforts have been curtailed by your lobbying efforts to Congress. We ask that you join forces with us to find solutions. Help us in our non-partisan, physician-driven research efforts at AFFIRM Research.

We invite you to be part of the solution.

You dismissed the ACP’s position statement on preventing death and injury from gun violence by stating, “Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves.”

We extend our invitation for you to collaborate with us to find workable, effective strategies to diminish the death toll from suicide, homicide, domestic violence, and unintentional shootings for the thousands of Americans who will one day find themselves on the wrong side of a barrel of a gun.

We are not anti-gun. We are anti-bullet hole. Let’s work together.

Join us, or move over! This is our lane.