When I started sharing my stories onstage, I was delighted to find that other doctors would come up to me afterward and share their best stories. I began to wonder, “What if there was a way to collect and share these great therapeutic stories, so everyone could have access to them.” This is the result.
Please feel free use the stories you find there with your patients, and add your own.
The Recalcitrant Patient
You might - just might - have patients who don’t take your advice and return with same problem again and again. For such patients, like inveterate smokers with recurrent upper respiratory infections or refluxers who just have to have that bowl of ice cream as a...
read moreSudden Deterioration in Condition
One of the most distressing things for a family is when a patient, usually elderly, suddenly gets worse and seems to be heading for a cliff. When I was a medical student at Columbia, we admitted a ninety-seven-year-old history professor with a broken hip. At his age,...
read moreSetbacks in Recovery
Patients recovering from surgery or an illness sometimes perceive they’re having setbacks or days when they don’t seem to be improving. Once I’ve determined that no untoward medical event has occurred, I explain progress this way: The course of recovery from anything...
read moreDiffering Advice from Different Physicians
We’ve all had patients seek second opinions and receive diagnostic and/or therapeutic recommendations from other practitioners that differ from ours. Or we refer a patient to a specialist who offers one plan, and then the patient sees another specialist who suggests...
read moreExplaining why you need to order a few specific tests, not a whole battery of them
A patient once asked me why I was ordering just a few diagnostics for him and not a “whole battery” of tests. “Why don’t you just order everything? What do you think is going on?” I realized that the patient was not asking for a differential diagnosis, but rather...
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