Do No Harm: Even To Those Who May Do It To You
It’s your third year and you’re well into your internal medicine clerkship, finally putting to practice all the skills Dr. Moffitt has taught you….
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Please Hold For Your Vaccine, We Are Experiencing Technical Issues
Many are taking solace in the new year after a rough 2020. Healthcare workers (including medical students) find themselves patiently waiting in long lines…
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Treating the Sick While Sick
As children, many of us were kept home when ill, both to facilitate recovery and to avoid spreading our colds to other kids. Many…
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The Limit to Your Love: Should You Recuse Yourself from Care?
Nearly all of us who enter the medical field do so with the main intention of caring for others. We often also have secondary…
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Corporatization of Medicine: Human Health as a Business Transaction
An increasing number of patients over recent years have noted appointments at a doctor’s office feel rushed or have been in an emergency department…
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What is Physician Empathy?
The word empathy, as we understand it today, is a relatively recent creation of only the past 60 years or so. It came into…
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Prescribing Placebos in Non Life Threatening Disease: Is it Ethical?
The placebo effect is widely known amongst medical professionals and patients and has been shown to be powerful. Though unable to cure disease, studies…
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Death, Ethics, and History
Working in a medical profession almost invariably means having to confront human mortality. Though death is ultimately inevitable, in many situations physicians can experience…
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The Importance of Medical Ethics: A Short Anecdote
During one of our medical ethics lectures, Dr. David Beyda posed a question: Should convicted prisoners be eligible to receive organ transplants, even if…
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The Physician-Patient Relationship: A Personal Reflection
The physician-patient relationship is the bedrock of medical practice and humanity. Humanity is “compassionate, sympathetic, or generous behavior or disposition.” It includes the idea…
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