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4 weeks ago | 
healio.com | Emma Bascom |Eleanor R Menzin |Mindy Valcarcel
Key takeaways: With work hour restrictions, there has been a decline in trainees’ procedural competency. An expert discussed the benefits and drawbacks of the restrictions and how the harms can be alleviated with mentorship. Well-intentioned work hour restrictions in medical training have led to a less competent work force, according to an expert. Increasing primary care procedures is a solution to this, according to Eleanor R. Menzin, MD.
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Sep 19, 2024 | 
jamanetwork.com | Eleanor R Menzin |Longwood Pediatrics
On a Sunday morning in June, I walked to the local bakery while catching up with an old friend by phone. By the time I reached the brick storefront, we had discussed work, adult children, and aging parents. As I stood in line enjoying the sunshine, my friend confessed to worrying about some laboratory tests ordered at a recent clinic visit and unaddressed by the portal questions sent when the results popped up. Just take screenshots and send them to me, I suggested.
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Jul 14, 2024 | 
kevinmd.com | Eleanor R Menzin |Casey Paul Schukow |Naomi Tweyo Nkinsi |Keila N. Lopez
I can hear my husband chuckling from the cavern of journal piles and stacks of free conference tote bags he refers to as his home office. “I am looking at a graph of your publications,” he calls out to me as I putter around the house. An inauspicious start. As I look over his shoulder at the laptop screen, he shows the tiny dot representing my singular publication—work I did as an undergraduate—in the 30 years from 1993 to 2022.
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Jun 17, 2024 | 
jamanetwork.com | Eleanor R Menzin |Longwood Pediatrics
Turn a Kind Eye—Offering Positive Reframing After months of internal debate, I made the dermatologist appointment. Facing several upcoming photography-heavy events and filled with the tales of filler and botulinum toxin A (Botox) success from my New York friends, I was ready for a consultation. The dermatologist readily agreed that she could laser the 2 prominent solar lentigines on my cheek.
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Mar 25, 2024 | 
annfammed.org | Eleanor R Menzin |Longwood Pediatrics
AbstractA primary care pediatrician casts a skeptical eye at the American Academy of Pediatrics Obesity Guideline. Using back-of-the-envelope calculations, she explains that meeting the guidelines would swamp her office, hospital, and the country’s clinicians in a manner that is unrealistic. Warning against the alienation that boots-on-the-ground clinicians experience when guidelines are too theoretical to be practical, she suggests alternative avenues for addressing this public health issue.
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Nov 15, 2023 | 
jamanetwork.com | Eleanor R Menzin |Longwood Pediatrics
Spielberg’s Secret Alone on a long drive, I should have been listening to risk management continuing medical education; instead, I indulged in the guilty pleasure of binge listening to the SmartLess podcast. SmartLess is hosted by 3 US actors. Each week, one host brings a famous surprise guest, and the 4 engage in unscripted, often funny, conversation.
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Oct 16, 2023 | 
jamanetwork.com | Eleanor R Menzin |Longwood Pediatrics
Waiting for a Heart Valve—You Can’t Go Back On Thursday, my 87-year-old father emailed me saying he wanted to drive to New York where his 95-year-old sister had been hospitalized with congestive heart failure. He planned to stand outside a venerable academic hospital wearing a sandwich board sign proclaiming, “This hospital has been denying a heart valve to a 95-year-old for a week.” The family firmly vetoed that plan.
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Sep 27, 2023 | 
kevinmd.com | Diane W. Shannon |Monique Tello |Lisa Chan |Eleanor R Menzin
“Physicians have no autonomy.” I read and hear versions of this every day, expressed with anger, resignation, or both. It’s also called agency, control, and power (as in feeling empowered). I’m the first one to admit that physicians have way less autonomy than in the ten decades that preceded this one. Moving from private practice to employed models, heightened focus on productivity, compensation via RVUs, and mergers have shifted the power dynamics.
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Sep 26, 2023 | 
kevinmd.com | Eleanor R Menzin |Jennifer Lynn |Homer Moutran |Caline El-Khoury
When my parents were 22, they were two years out of college. My mother was married and commuting from Dallas to graduate school in Houston, on the verge of another cross-country move and a metaphorical world away from her New York City upbringing. My father was the officer running the kitchen on a United States Navy frigate somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea, a literal world away from his Brooklyn childhood. When I was 22, I was finishing my first year of medical school.
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Sep 14, 2023 | 
jamanetwork.com | Eleanor R Menzin |Longwood Pediatrics
By the time she died a few weeks before her 106th birthday, my grandmother’s wisdom was canonized in our family as Grandma Ruth’s Rules. The rules were a quirky mix of practicality and self-taught etiquette from a woman who had evolved from first-generation American to wearing matching jewelry sets for her subscription to the Metropolitan Opera. The most often quoted rules were: Never discuss the guests until you know they are at the train station, everyone likes a gift, and always write a note.
