Tag: emergency medicine

Case Report

“Case Report” document’s the author’s simultaneous experiences of being a medical student and sexual assault survivor. It moves through the aftermath of the trauma living solidly in two worlds, as an insider and outsider of healthcare.

This brief story describes numerous interactions with a range of health care providers, as well as interactions that occur with friends, a pharmacist, patients, and others. By showing examples of unhelpful and helpful ways people responded to a sexual assault survivor, this story can prompt important discussions about compassionate care and social support. It also provides insight into how a provider’s own traumatic experiences inform their approach to medical care. Some of the interactions in the story are difficult to read so advance notice may be appropriate with some audiences.

Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life.

A critical care/palliative care specialist describes hard cases at the end of life, admitting times when she has been unclear about how to advise families making difficult decisions about taking loved ones off of what she describes as the “end of life conveyor belt” of extreme measures seen in emergency rooms. From NYT book review: “Medical training fosters a heroic model of saving lives at any cost. American can-do optimism assumes all problems can and should be solved. Both doctors and patients tend to subscribe to a ‘more is better’ philosophy. If technology exists, surely it should be used. Physicians’ fears of litigation plays a part, as do patients’ fantasies of perpetual life. For too many, death remains unthinkable and unspeakable.” A 25-minute documentary that features her and shows some of these kinds of conversations is available on Netflix (“Extremis,” 2016)

Creative writing as a medical instrument

“Writing stories can create better doctors.” Baruch is convinced that narrative medicine – focusing on close reading – isn’t enough to prepare physicians to deal with ambiguities, confusions and conflicts inherent in medical practice. He urges teaching them to write stories so they can hear their patients’ stories better. References and describes courses he has taught (one with an MFA creative writer) to teach medical students about characters, conflict, selecting key details … storytelling elements often emphasized in creative writing. The goal is to encourage them to struggle with words on the screen (or page) to prepare to more deeply understand the fragmented, often confusing stories presented by patients. Good preparation for a teacher contemplating a narrative assignment; maybe less so for the students themselves.

Wait times: Slipping through the cracks in the emergency room.

A man tells the story of watching his wife suffer agonizing pain for several hours from an ovarian torsion, eventually losing the ovary, and uses that as a starting point to describe how often women’s pain is dismissed by doctors and other caregivers, especially other women.

The story could also prompt discussion of how to account for the health care provider behavior in this story. Do we blame incompetent and insensitive health care providers? What features of their working conditions might produce the behavior this story recounts?