A blog about the inner workings of the field of medicine and its theoretical, practical, and ethical complexities.
By: Aaron Rothstein
August 7, 2014
My editors here at The New Atlantis suggested I write about what a day is like for me and other members of the medical team. What exactly (aside from rounding) do we do all day? When do we have to be in? When do we leave? What goes on when we’re not rounding? We can divide the third year of medical school into three distinct...
August 1, 2014
“Here is a hand-to-hand struggle in all its horror and frightfulness,” wrote Henri Dunant, a nineteenth-century international activist, in his book A Memory of Solferino. The book concerns the Battle of Solferino in June of 1859 between the Austrians and the French. Dunant describes the combatants “trampling each other under foot,...
July 10, 2014
There was a crowd of security guards, physicians, and nurses in an ED room. The patient inside squirmed and writhed on the stretcher while sweating profusely, soaking his clothing and the hospital bed. Though slender and slightly cachectic, the patient had fought off the security entourage multiple times, like a snake slipping from their...
June 24, 2014
I had just finished introducing myself to the resident when the EMTs wheeled in a patient on a stretcher. The patient’s face was completely pale and expressionless and his eyes were closed; his hair looked disheveled and unwashed. He wore tattered jeans, a soiled white t-shirt with holes, and white sneakers with untied shoelaces. His...
June 16, 2014
Hospital image via Shutterstock The paramedics flying the patient in by helicopter called the Emergency Department charge nurse and described the patient: a 40-year-old male in a construction accident with deep lacerations (wounds) to the left leg. The moment between the paramedics’ call and arrival was only a few minutes. During this...
June 5, 2014
Ambulance image via Shutterstock The Emergency Department is one of the most active and exciting parts of the hospital because it is the hospital’s sieve. The ED physician determines whether an injury or complaint is life-threatening or not and then treats or admits the patient to the hospital if necessary. Someone usually comes in by...
May 12, 2014
Pediatrics rounds are similar to what I described in one of my initial posts. We spend most of the morning visiting each pediatric patient with the attending physician and deciding on a treatment plan with the parents. Frequently we encounter patients on “contact precaution,” which means they have a highly communicable infection. In...
April 22, 2014
At this point, I have spent one month on pediatric surgery, one month on trauma surgery (a service that deals mainly with adults who need emergency general surgical procedures), and one month on general pediatrics. It’s clear already that physicians treat pediatric and adult patients very differently. Children need high levels of...
April 16, 2014
One of the things I hope to accomplish in this blog is to document my change in perspective as third year progresses. Part of this means addressing the topic of cynicism in medicine, which refers to an unhealthy skepticism towards patient complaints, callous detachment from death and sickness and even, perhaps, nastiness in situations...
April 7, 2014
In the hospital, older patients frequently go through a process called sundowning or delirium, where they see and imagine things that don’t exist. The etiology of this has to do with an aberrant sleep-wake cycle. Nurses and doctors constantly check in on patients throughout the night and wake them up to get blood tests, check...