Kristine M. Diaz, PsyD
This is part of a series by the STFM Group on LGBT Health for LGBT Pride Month.
“I don’t trust my family practice doctor to treat me.”
A pre-med student who identifies as a transgender male shared this statement with me recently. I swallowed my desire to pacify him with “We are working on it.” I just listened.
Posted in LGBT Health Collaborative
Tagged AAMC, education, family doctor, Family Medicine, health, LGBT, LGBT community, LGBT Health, medical school, Residency, teaching
Sarina Schrager, MD, MS
New faculty members are bombarded with a plethora of new duties. Clinical and teaching work tends to take precedence because of their urgency, while scholarship and professional development is at risk of neglect until those tasks becomes urgent as well. So how does a faculty member stay on top of all of these tasks?
Many faculty make weekly to-do lists and day to day lists in order to stay up to date on current projects. I have found that using a structured to-do list is very helpful in getting more done. The list helps me navigate the academic workload and maintain a sense of purpose and accomplishment.
Another benefit to using to-do lists is that it increases my productivity. Psychology studies show that by writing down what you have to do, you unburden the brain from worrying about what you need do to and can actually accomplish more (The Zeigarnik effect).
Heidi Chumley, MD
As we continue to evolve how we prepare medical students to join the US physician workforce, we should continue to create global health experiences that will impact how we approach clinical practice—whether that be when managing a diverse patient population or when addressing the global health issues that are now on our doorstep.
When I was in medical school, we often saw the term international health in the context of faraway villages where issues like access to clean water, sanitation, and basic understanding of the spread of disease were at the heart of figuring out how to improve a community’s well-being.
As medical students, we viewed short-term medical mission trips as our way of getting a glimpse of the world outside our environment and gaining exposure to not just tropical diseases that we would never see at home, but also to the ways that healthcare providers in these settings coped in order to care for their patients.
Things changed somewhere along the way, and what we used to call international health became global health, the term much more indicative of a connected world where diseases–and physicians–crossed borders. A decade ago it was SARS and later the avian flu. Recently we had our first cases of Ebola in Dallas and New York City. Global health, it seems, has come home.
In the journal Family Medicine, Dr John Frey III of the University of Wisconsin writes that global health experiences can be “a treatment for [US] medical myopia,” referring to a seeming inability for the US clinical and educational systems to learn from other cultures and systems. “At its best,” he writes, “global health offers a perspective based on humility rather than arrogance and on an openness and generosity of thought that changes thinking and practice in all directions.”
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