Explore this JAMA Internal Medicine series devoted to telling stories about the joys and challenges of practicing general medicine and truths discovered along the way.
This essay discusses the sharing of patient photographs by clinicians on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This essay describes a medical student’s former training as a musician and his pursuit for the same level of professional evaluation as a physician in training.
This essay considers how routine drug screening for opioids can threaten the trust between patient and physician, transforming a partnership aimed at improving health into a dynamic of judge and accused.
This essay describes the challenges that older adults faced during shelter-in-place orders during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This essay describes the author’s experience of systemic racism in medicine.
This physician perspective describes failings in the trauma disclosure system currently in place in the new patient intake process of most health care facilities.
This essay by a geriatrician reflects on his pediatric years and compares the vaccine jab he got during a polio epidemic to the one he got now, as a man of a certain age, during the coronavirus pandemic.
This article describes the unique difficulties faced by non-US citizen physicians during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This essay discusses the use of food substitutes rather than medications as a treatment for electrolyte repletion.
This article provides the perspective of a first-line responder after an explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, on August 4, 2020.
This essay describes the author’s personal experiences witnessing the opioid epidemic and its devastation in Kentucky.
This perspective is that of a nursing researcher turned volunteer in a COVID-19 vaccine trial. She considers the experience of study participants and how clinicians will need to prepare their patients for the vaccine’s possible adverse effects.
This essay discusses the prevalence of medical jargon and how clinicians can consciously avoid jargon and work to improve communication with patients and their families.
This article describes the care of a Jehovah’s Witness patient to highlight the importance of patient-centered care and shared decision-making when treating underrepresented populations at risk for stigmatization by the medical community.
This essay details the services provided by primary care clinicians that are not covered by fee-for-service payments but that are more important to patients, especially near the end of life, than many expensive, unwanted tests for which fee-for-service payments are available.
This Perspective details the unnecessary restrictions on gay men donating blood and the impact of these restrictions on the critical shortages of blood supply during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This essay discusses the difficulties associated with mourning in the time of coronavirus 2019.
This article assesses the loss of the physical examination amid telehealth visits during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic.
This essay discusses the need for more diversity in the physician workforce to benefit patients and society.
This essay describes the author’s adaptations to dystopian changes in hospital procedures and the reverberations throughout her life brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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