Last week I mentioned the first agreement in Don Miguel Ruiz’s book The Four Agreements, be impeccable with your word. Today’s post is about agreement #3, don’t make assumptions. Being a Palliative Care doctor helped me learn to be more direct in my speech. One of the keys to this was to stop making […]
Learning Spiritual Truths Read More »
Yesterday, a patient told me that “nothing was being done” to treat the cancer that had been diagnosed four months ago. I pulled up the most recent oncology note in the computer and read the details to him. Of course the oncologist had told him everything I was telling him. Why did the patient not
Palliative Care Is Like Memory Foam Read More »
The whole Palliative Care community was saddened to hear of the death of Dr. Andy Billings. You can find his obituary here, and you can learn more about him in this article from the New York Times on “How Doctors Die.” I learned of his death just hours before I was scheduled to present a journal
Teaching the Skill of Empathy: The Legacy of J. Andrew Billings, MD Read More »
The physician leader literature is full of references to “the disruptive physician,” the one who openly humiliates and bullies other providers on the health care team. Often, one thinks of an older male physician denigrating a younger female nurse. Lack of open communication in health care, though, with team members failing to speak up on
Does a Physician Have to Be Disruptive to Be a Bully? Read More »
