This is just plain fun … all about medical “words” … enjoy!
Poetry of Medicine: Morphine, Meningitis, and Myths of Medical Words was presented by Rohin Francis, MBBS, Medlife Crisis for MedPageToday.com, 1 August 2019.
Anesthesia, adrenal, atropine: all medical terms you might use daily. But where do these common words and phrases come from? Watch this video and find out.
Rohin Francis, MBBS, is an interventional cardiologist, internal medicine doctor, and university researcher who makes science videos and bad jokes. Offbeat topics you won’t find elsewhere, enriched with a government-mandated dose of humor. Trained in Cambridge; now PhD-ing in London.
And then there are … The Five Most Important Words You Can Say to a Patient, written by Suneel Dhand, M.D., for MedPageToday.com, 30 July 2019. DO YOU AGREE??? Let me know!
Our job as healthcare professionals is not just to diagnose our patients by applying our scientific knowledge and clinical skills, but also to be the “communicator-in-chief,” “listener-in-chief,” and “reassurer-in-chief.”
Any doctor who doesn’t fully grasp this is not doing the best job they can or being the best doctor they can be. I truly believe that over 90% of our everyday job as a physician involves being a good communicator.
But the patient who is about to walk in and see us, or lying in the room we are about to enter, may have been waiting to see us for hours, days, or weeks. Imagine a family member or friend, the one you love the most, in that helpless situation where their life is turned upside down. It’s important we never forget that, and remember that a large number of our patients are very anxious about the situation they are in.
The number one thing our patients want in those precious few minutes we have with them is to feel that their doctor truly cares and is there to help them. That’s our job in a nutshell.
Most of the time, when discussing any potential serious issue that is going to be very treatable, any physician can simply lean in and say with a calm reassuring empathetic voice: “It’s going to be OK.”
Read more: The Five Most Important Words You Can Say to a Patient
And one more written by Heather Walker, a T1 and doctoral candidate whose blog is The Chronic Scholar with a tagline: Briding Patient Experience and the Ivory Tower. Her latest post is #IHearYou.
Living with diabetes requires sooooo much effort. The daily requirements of staying alive are relentless and unending. It is messy, unpredictable, and damn frustrating most of the time. The biggest thing though, is that unless you have a friend or community who also has it, you are likely to feel misunderstood. And even when you have friends and community, at times you can still feel largely alone.
In recognizing this, I added an a ction component to my dissertation research. A promise I made to myself when I began my PhD journey was to never do research for the sake of research. I will always do research for the sake of change. Rather than hope that some change would happen once I put results into the world, I worked in a method to elicit change in-real-time. The action group I convened was made up of 8 PWD, called Peer Collaborators. Over the course of a month, they went through a process of identifying ‘the best of what is’ and ‘imagining what could be’ for diabetes online communities. At the end of the month, having reflected a great deal on the strengths and assets of their communities, they designed the #IHearYou campaign.
And now, for my favorite part … Pet(s) of the Week!
If you want to see you pet(s) name up in the ‘net, tell me about him/her/them and a few jpgs … email them to me at joanne@thesavvydiabetic.com. I’ll post a new pet every week … HOW FUN!!! The pet doesn’t NOT have to have diabetes … it’s enough that these furry loving creatures give us so much comfort and joy.
Please meet my pups, Hey Buddy (whose middle name is “I’m busy”) and Bon Bon. They are just happy, loving, curious (well, mostly it’s Hey Buddy whose curious, Bon Bon is simply the princess).
Hey Buddy is a West Highland Scottish Terrier and most happy when he is by our sides, in case we need him. He entirely an empath … if I am upset or agitated, he urgently crawls into my lap, pushing as close to me as he can. He is food driven and will learn any trick if there is a treat involved.
Bon Bon is a Lhasa Apso, hailing from Tibet. They were bred to be palace homebodies and guards … and that’s what she does. If we are out in the backyard, she’s in the middle of our bed watching. If you come close, she’ll left a hind leg so that you can more easily give her a tummy rub.
I love the pups. I adore pets, meaning dogs of course. Bravo for the pet posts.
As for the remained. Bravo to Heather, #IHEARYOU is a cool campaign.