Tag Archives: teaching

Family Medicine Educators Need to Lead on Eliminating Race-Based Medicine

Posted on March 18, 2019 by | 5 comments
Andrea K. Westby, MD

Andrea K. Westby, MD

The practice of medicine—the traditions, diagnoses, treatments, and guidelines—is ever-changing, with new research and information flowing into clinical care at a pace that rivals the turbulence and abundance of a mountain stream in the spring. We now acknowledge human papillomavirus infection as the primary driver of cervical and now oropharyngeal cancer. Hormone replacement therapy is no longer routinely recommended for postmenopausal women. Rate control is preferred over rhythm control in atrial fibrillation. Prostate cancer screening is no longer reflexively ordered for adult men.

However, as we look back at the past hundred years, our profession has been glacially slow to release the vice grip that the concept of biological race has had on our science and our medical practice.

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Posted in Family Medicine Stories, Public Health

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Advice for New Faculty: When the Road Less Traveled Ends in Thorns

Posted on July 12, 2017 by | 1 comment
mitchell-f-richard

Richard F. Mitchell, MD,

For many clinicians, the path of medicine is a comfortable one—well-worn, made by many feet before your own. From college to residency and beyond, the courses to take, exams to pass, and applications to fill out have been laid out for us in a nice, orderly path. There is some room for brief excursions off the path, but the route to our prescribed life of clinic medicine, hospital medicine, specialty care like sports med, OB, or geriatrics, or some combination thereof is a well-marked trail with lighted signs to guide us all the way.

Until the day you decide to teach. I recall talking to our program director on the first day I had administrative time and asked, “What should I do?” His response: “I don’t care.”

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Posted in Faculty Development, New Faculty in Family Medicine Collaborative, Research, Uncategorized

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Resilient Faculty, Resilient Residents

Posted on April 10, 2017 by | 1 comment

Kathleen Rowland, MD, MS

Change is here, and more is coming. In medicine, we often perceive change, especially external change from hospital systems or payers, to be a threat. We feel a loss of control, which can lead to anger, resentment, and burnout.1 A survey of 3,000 US physicians done by a staffing company found that 58% of physicians who left medicine in 2013 reported doing so because they didn’t want to practice in an era of health care reform. This is more than stated they left because of economic factors such as malpractice insurance or reimbursement concerns (50%).2 The changes we face can feel overwhelming, and we have to take measures to make the changes less daunting.  

Being resilient does not mean that we become pushovers. The goal of teaching resilience to change is to increase the sense that we are able to react to, triage, and adapt to changes while maintaining the core of who we are: physician teachers and healers. We can fight unwinnable battles or choose good ones. We can hold out on changing until the demand to do so is punitive, or we can adopt the change at a comfortable pace.  We often do not choose the changes we face, but can choose the way we respond. As we restore that independence, we can reduce our risk of burnout and increase our satisfaction with practice.  

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Posted in Education, Faculty Development, Residency

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