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Sep 23, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Jessica Reeves |Tasia Isbell |Nishant Pandya |Stephanie E. Moss
My Role As ‘The Clinician In The Family’Two really common clinical scenarios. First: male, late 60s, painless hematuria, referred to urology. Cystoscopy reveals lesion on bladder wall; stage I bladder cancer. Second: female, 70, unwitnessed fall, no prodromal symptoms. ED visit two days later, incidental finding of two cerebral aneurysms but otherwise normal workup, working diagnosis: syncope.
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Sep 23, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Tasia Isbell |Nishant Pandya |Stephanie E. Moss |Danielle Pigneri
The story of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is a cautionary tale about the dangers of false alarms. The shepherd boy repeatedly tricks the villagers into believing a wolf is attacking his flock. When a real wolf finally appears, the villagers ignore his cries. The moral is clear: Repeated false alarms lead to skepticism and inattention when genuine danger arises. But what do you do when it is a 14-year-old girl who cried pancreatitis, and not a boy and the threat of a wolf?
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Sep 23, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Nishant Pandya |Stephanie E. Moss |Danielle Pigneri |Lisa Belisle
The Patient Isn’t Sick, But We Can Still Treat the Parent“Kid’s a level 5. Fever starting six hours ago, runny nose. He’s fine.”Her three-year-old son had developed a fever and rhinorrhea that day. She was worried about an ear infection. His exam showed no signs of otitis media and we discussed how a viral upper respiratory infection likely caused his fever. “Thank god.” The heavy relief in her sigh told me there was something left unsaid.
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Aug 19, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Lauren Grawert |Nishant Pandya |Melissa Schiffman
When the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, it expanded access to health insurance and preventative health care services for millions of Americans. Two of the most popular and most utilized aspects of the bill include extension of health care coverage to age 26 for dependents and complete coverage of 22 key preventative health care services without any copayment or deductible.
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Aug 19, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Nishant Pandya |Melissa Schiffman |Giulia Faison
Patient rooms are rarely quiet at the urgent care office. The sounds of children yelling, families talking, and restless siblings making balloons from medical gloves serve as the background to our workdays. Entering a bustling room is a manageable challenge. It’s one of my responsibilities to join the fray and kick off a conversation. I like finding the right wavelength to match the room’s energy. Compared with a noisy room, I find it more challenging to communicate with the distracted family.
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Aug 19, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Nishant Pandya |Melissa Schiffman |Giulia Faison
My earliest encounter with appendicitis was when I was in medical school, but not via textbooks and CT scans, in the way that you would expect. I had stayed up late studying and decided on Taco Bell for a late-night snack. For some reason, half an hour after eating, I ended up on the treadmill, maybe to work off those excess calories. A few hours later, I had abdominal pain unlike anything I’d ever had. I'm not prone to abdominal pain. And yes, it was periumbilical.
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May 16, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Nishant Pandya |Ryan McCormick |Ryan Mccormick |Hardeep Phull |Mohini Dasari
“Any tips on helping him sleep better?”I sat across from a tired mother holding her 7-month-old son who was waking up every three hours to breastfeed overnight. I froze, because I did not have an immediate answer to her question. I could regurgitate the safe sleep guidelines and recite appropriate intervals between feeding to prevent hypoglycemia, but I could tell that was not the guidance she sought. I mumbled something about winding down and keeping a regular schedule.
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Apr 17, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Chris van Eyck |Jennifer Boyle |Nishant Pandya
As a PA, Do I Regret Not Going to Medical School? We have no “do-overs” in life. Oftentimes, we ruminate on our life choices, and wonder if we made the right decisions. Would I do it all over again? Now that I have walked the walk, would the steps I took be the same? My role in health care is very similar in many aspects to those of a physician, however, my title has the additional “assistant,” or “associate” tag on the end. What does it mean to be an “assistant” in health care?
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Apr 15, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Nishant Pandya |Jennifer Boyle |George Vetrovec
“Can’t we heal him faster?”I was sitting across from a teenage soccer player and his mother. His ankle was not fractured. It was swollen after an opponent stepped on him. As I discussed conservative management centered around rest, the sullen 15-year-old nodded attentively. His mother shook her head, barely hiding her frustration. “He just recovered from a knee sprain and a pulled hamstring. He has a soccer tournament this weekend.
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Apr 15, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Jennifer Boyle |Nishant Pandya |George Vetrovec
Disclosure: Researching and writing about this topic has served as a kind of therapy for me. I found myself in need of such therapy because recently I realized that I was tip-toeing closer and closer toward a bad place. This bad place is the mental state where you start to bristle at the thought of checklists and huddles and time-outs and debriefs — and here’s a secret, they’re all checklists by different names. I even found myself wondering if safety culture could ever make things less safe.
