I am a family practitioner who somehow survived the medical education
process. I like to see my patients smile. I listen to them, work to understand the meanings of their stories,
and assist them to think of new and better ways to direct the course of their life stories. I try to help them heal.
I spend real time with my patients. Some become my friends.
I practice this way because patients need me to practice this way and because I couldn't
live with myself if I didn't. When undergoing surgeries as a child, I needed a doctor to listen to me and
to include my self in addition to my body in my medical treatment. But that kind of care never happened. I struggle
with the effects of that depersonalization to this day.
At one point in my career, I became a faculty member in a medical school. I
developed student and patient centered courses and worked with other faculty members to be better listeners to our students.
I hoped to impress upon the faculty that you can't tell students to listen to patients if no one is listening to the students.
A few seemed to understand. But at a department meeting I mentioned how I tried to listen to the residents about their
personal issues when they were on call. The other faculty members laughed. There was no way they could afford
to lose sleep to take care of the residents. Survival is the name of the game in medicine. In the end, as
my job became the work that others wanted me to do, and the work that mattered to me would have to be done on my own
time without pay, I realized I couldn't help anyone else if I didn't survive myself. That is when I left academia.
After time away to begin a family and to heal myself, I am doing a little teaching
again. I use creative writing with premedical students to help them better understand the issues of patients.
I am dusting off my poetry books to develop a poetry-based curriculum on death and dying. I'm looking at medical student
essays and literary short stories for a selective on women and medicine. And as I've done for several years now,
I'm honing up my ideas for my creative writing selective.
And I'm practicing psychiatry, in addition to doing quality assurance consults
in a community health center. Sometimes I see medical students as patients. And their distress renews my
frustration with medical education and its dehumanizing ways.
I hope to use this web site to explore medical student abuse and how problems in medical education
may have evolved, as well as to offer solutions to these problems. I will also talk about creative writing in medical
education, curriculum development, literature and medicine, medical humanities, medical practice, and other topics that may
(or may not) be relevant to medical education reform.
I hope you will feel free to peruse the web pages as I build them, and offer comments and discussion.
Medicine seems so discouraging sometimes; maybe together we can fantasize a better version.
