Two Lists

Two Lists

I am not a regular reader of Harvard Business Review, but frequently there is wisdom about leadership, personal and professional growth and personal and organizational sustainability that is directly applicable to our lives as clinicians, teachers and researchers. One that I cut out, printed and have on my desk is advice from Peter Bregman, who coaches CEOs of large corporations They, like health professionals, have too many tasks, too many decisions, too many distractions, and too many requests, and have to make implicit or explicit choices about where direct their energy.

Read More

Shared Mind

Shared Mind

In addition to my teaching and clinical work, I lead research teams devoted to helping patients and their families have a voice in their care and helping clinicians develop the skills to communicate effectively. Good communication with others depends on knowing yourself; mindfulness and self-awareness help you to calibrate and adjust to the inevitable biases in perception and judgment that you might have.

Read More

Ninety Seconds for the Patient

Ninety Seconds for the Patient

So often we listen to respond, not to understand, as Steven Covey noted in his best-selling book, “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” 1 As doctors, we are trained to respond; we are doers, we get to the point, take charge and fix. However, people come to see us with other hopes for consultation. They want to feel understood. While we’re trained to “take” a history and provide recommendations, often we forget the most important thing – patients want to know that someone is listening.

Read More

The Ambiguity of Grief

The Ambiguity of Grief

This week, my wife, Deborah Fox, will be producing a performance of Claudio Monteverdi’s opera, L’Orfeo, from 1607. One of dozens of retellings of the Greek myth, and perhaps the most beautiful. Orpheus embodied the power of love, and, on hearing his transcendent music, animals stopped in their tracks, and boulders shed tears. And, when his newly wed wife, Eurydice, was killed by a snakebite before they could consummate their marriage, his music charmed the ferryman to bring him to the underworld and won the heart of Pluto to release her from the land of the dead.

But, as in all good stories, there was a catch. In leaving the land of the dead and reclaiming life on earth, Orpheus had to abide by one condition – he could not look back, lest he be condemned to eternal loss. From here, there are several versions of distraction – Orpheus wanting to share the beauty of sunlight, Orpheus hearing by a commotion, Orpheus in a moment of doubt that Eurydice is really following him – all converging on a single moment when Orpheus looks back, and the image of Eurydice fades and disappears, she sings, “Do you lose me through too much love?”

Read More

Getting Back to Basics

Getting Back to Basics

Frequently I am asked to describe how practicing mindfully is integral to good medical practice, yet it is sometimes difficult to put it into just a few words. I had one opportunity recently. Bill Ventres, a friend and family physician, is putting together a book of “philosophies” of medicine and asked me to write a chapter. It was a difficult assignment: no more than 500 words, no more than one picture. I procrastinated, choosing to write longer pieces instead, much easier than writing a short piece.

Then, I realized that procrastination was actually my friend – through distractions and daydreaming, putting things off and writing and rewriting, I came to a new clarity. I might not have put it all this way had I been provided the same opportunity even a few years ago. Like all important ideas, it grows and evolves and has a life of their own, and we only catch glimpses of its truth. So, here is mindful practice, with a date stamp, May 2, 2022:

Read More

Furious to Curious

Furious to Curious

In the chaos and frustrations of the seemingly endless pandemic and societal upheavals, it’s so tempting to look for someone or something to blame, the “evil other” who, by virtue of differences in perspective or beliefs, is crafted into a justified target for anger. Whatever your beliefs about the pandemic, racism, guns, reproductive health, government and money, more than ever in recent memory, there’s a target – it’s them, not us.

Read More

Slow Medicine: Gardening, Patient Care, and Ourselves

Slow Medicine: Gardening, Patient Care, and Ourselves

In her book, God’s Hotel, physician-author Victoria Sweet contrasts “fast medicine,” with its emphasis on reversing pathology through medication and surgery, and “slow medicine,” with its emphasis on close attention to individuals’ unique illness trajectories and optimizing the conditions that help the body heal. According to Sweet, practicing fast medicine is more like being a mechanic whereas practicing slow medicine is more like being a gardener.

Read More

Shifting Perspectives

Shifting Perspectives

A few months ago, at a master class, I played a movement from Bach’s first English Suite. I was focusing on the details, as if each note mattered more than anything else in the moment, which, of course, in Bach’s exquisite complexity, is not an unfair assumption. Mark, the teacher whom I was meeting for the first time, said to me that the notes didn’t matter, it was the figures that mattered. He explained that figures are the next level, groups of two or three or four or five notes. If you listen for the figures, you’ll hear them here, then there, then you realize that they - the figures – form the warp and weft of the music. Think of Beethoven’s fifth - da da da duhhhh. You hear that little figure over and over again. It doesn’t matter whether the da or the duh is a high note or a low note, a loud note or a soft note, a slow note or a fast note, an e-flat or a b-natural; it’s the pattern. My mantra became, “The notes don’t matter, hold onto the figures.”

Read More

Listening

Listening

Earlier this month, David Brooks, a NY Times columnist, published a truly inspiring op-ed piece, Nine Nonobvious Ways to Have Deeper Conversations. As I read through this short piece, I was again reminded that the work we do as clinicians and educators often comes down to listening – listening to others and to oneself in a deep, undistracted, caring and compassionate way. He frames his article as a preparation for family gatherings – now mostly virtual – for this extraordinarily poignant holiday season, but its implications extend much further.

Read More

Awareness and Vulnerability, With Kindness

Awareness and Vulnerability, With Kindness

Terror Management Theory describes what happens when we, as vulnerable humans, experience “mortality salience,” that feeling when the possibility or reality of our own death becomes close enough to cause discomfort. I experienced this, just as described, several years ago when a conscientious ultrasonographer incidentally found an 8 cm liver mass while investigating a recent kidney stone. She was hovering over my right upper quadrant for a long time, far from the affected kidney. I asked her what was going on and she indicated that the radiologist would have to explain. Everyone was very clear, concerned and kind.

Read More

Uncertainty by Ron Epstein

Uncertainty by Ron Epstein

Several months ago, Paul Han, a physician colleague in Maine, asked if I’d review his book – then in preparation – about uncertainty. Uncertainty seemed like a timely topic for doctors and remarkably little has been written about it over the years. In his articles, Paul has taken uncertainty from a superficial discussion (“Do I know enough and where can I find the answer?”) to new depths. Paul talks about two kinds of uncertainty. 1. The first is stochastic uncertainty. For someone who is critically ill, we might find statistics that indicate that 80% of patients with a similar presentation recover from XYZ, but no one can say whether they will be one of the lucky 80% or the unlucky 20%. While this kind of not-knowing can be anxiety-provoking, we have some idea of what is known and what is not. We have some sense of the terrain, some idea about the possibilities. We can calculate risks and then decide whether we want to take them.

Read More