Who are these peo­ple we poke and prod?

Well, for one, they are our cus­tomers. They pay the bills that keep our lights on and our stetho­scopes and K-Y cold.And they’re the rea­son we’re here.

In choos­ing our pro­fes­sion, we were granted entry into patients’ lives, and even their bod­ies, by virtue of our white coat.

They are our honor and responsibility.

~From Don’t Jet­ti­son Med­i­cine: Resus­ci­tate Your Pas­sion for the Career You Loved by Patri­cia Ray­mond MD with Robert A. Raymond

Crit­i­cism hurts because some­one is telling us that we are, in essence, dumb, slow, stu­pid, obnox­ious, or smelly. But what really hurts that, deep down, we know there is likely a grain of truth in it.

Look at all crit­i­cism truth­fully, adjust your own behav­ior, and for­give the trans­gres­sions of oth­ers. Get over it or die mad.

It’s either that or stew in your juices
until your brains explode.

~From Don’t Jet­ti­son Med­i­cine: Resus­ci­tate Your Pas­sion for the Career You Loved by Patri­cia Ray­mond MD with Robert A. Raymond

Most mal­prac­tice cases against doc­tors, prac­tices, and clin­ics come from ser­vice lapses.

Delays in ser­vice, sched­ul­ing sna­fus, dropped com­mu­ni­ca­tions — all work to make the patient see red (and then, alas, green).

Worse, they might tell ten of their friends, and sud­denly your wait­ing room is empty. So what was the true cost of not keep­ing that one patient happy?

~From Don’t Jet­ti­son Med­i­cine: Resus­ci­tate Your Pas­sion for the Career You Loved by Patri­cia Ray­mond MD with Robert A. Raymond

Patients. In their inter­views, they leave out crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion (like their hair is on fire) yet sup­ply the minu­tia (their Aunt Millie’s birthday).

Don’t they real­ize that you are in the con­trol tower at the Invalid Air­port, that you’ve got twelve more on approach and an in-air emer­gency!?! Can’t they get to the point? Can’t they make way for the next patient?

Don’t they know it’s
“Greet ‘em, treat ‘em, and street ‘em”?

~From Don’t Jet­ti­son Med­i­cine: Resus­ci­tate Your Pas­sion for the Career You Loved by Patri­cia Ray­mond MD with Robert A. Raymond

You are fully clothed, your butt is not exposed, you got a good night’s sleep, ate what you wanted for break­fast, and you’re not in pain or frightened.

So be gra­cious to your patient. Knock on their door, and ask for per­mis­sion to enter. Intro­duce your­self, and state your pur­pose. Explain what you are going to do to them. Ask for per­mis­sion to exam­ine them. Explain what you found.

~From Don’t Jet­ti­son Med­i­cine: Resus­ci­tate Your Pas­sion for the Career You Loved by Patri­cia Ray­mond MD with Robert A. Raymond

Once you’ve restarted a human heart, it fol­lows that you should over­see the office billing, do the tran­scrip­tion, and stop the leaky toi­let. After all, com­pe­tence flows from your fin­gers. And there goes another evening.

Be real­is­tic – would the lights shut off, the sun stop, and the world end if you maybe del­e­gated some of these tasks to others?

Unless the out­come is “APOCALYPSE,”
you should be able to bounce back.

~From Don’t Jet­ti­son Med­i­cine: Resus­ci­tate Your Pas­sion for the Career You Loved by Patri­cia Ray­mond MD with Robert A. Raymond

And here is the sad fact:
most med­ical offices are woe­fully understaffed.

Blame the econ­omy. Blame huge med­ical cor­po­ra­tions. Blame the human trait of being penny-wise and pound-foolish. But nam­ing the cul­prit will not see it led away in hand­cuffs. Short staffing will prob­a­bly be with us for a long time to come.

~From Don’t Jet­ti­son Med­i­cine: Resus­ci­tate Your Pas­sion for the Career You Loved by Patri­cia Ray­mond MD with Robert A. Raymond

It’s believed that only 20% of all HCPs are extro­verts. That means that, once you exclude Hawk­eye Pierce and Patch Adams from the mix, the rest of us tend to be intro­verts. Med­i­cine is seri­ous busi­ness, no place for mon­keyshines, right?

I’ve let it be known that patients who cel­e­brated the hol­i­day that their colonoscopy exam­i­na­tion fell on — using their butt as a can­vas — could get a dis­count. Imag­ine my sur­prise when I pulled back the sheet cov­er­ing an elderly lady patient on Lincoln’s Birth­day and found a minia­tur­ized ver­sion (oh, the won­der of com­put­ers) of the Get­tys­burg Address taped to her nether cheek.

~From Don’t Jet­ti­son Med­i­cine: Resus­ci­tate Your Pas­sion for the Career You Loved by Patri­cia Ray­mond MD with Robert A. Raymond

 As HCPs, we know that every­one dies, and some don’t do it very neatly. Who bet­ter than a HCP to know exactly what the options are at the edges of life?

Of course, we all have plans to get around to our liv­ing wills even­tu­ally.

How­ever, if there is one shared expres­sion peo­ple have in front of the Pearly Gates, it is prob­a­bly one of surprise.

~From Don’t Jet­ti­son Med­i­cine: Resus­ci­tate Your Pas­sion for the Career You Loved by Patri­cia Ray­mond MD with Robert A. Raymond

Sex…And, as the joke goes, now we have your atten­tion. Our soci­ety has hang-ups when it comes to dis­course on intercourse.Look at the find­ings from the Caer­philly Study. For men, more sex means a longer life; those who have lower amounts of sex have a 1.5–2.0 times increased risk of death.

When ado­les­cent males whine, “I need it or I’m gonna die,” they really are not far off the mark.

~From Don’t Jet­ti­son Med­i­cine: Resus­ci­tate Your Pas­sion for the Career You Loved by Patri­cia Ray­mond MD with Robert A. Raymond

We HCPs, with the stresses and strains of our med­ical lives, at times look at our col­leagues, cowork­ers, or employ­ees as sim­ply tools…an IV pole that goes back in a closet when it’s not needed by us, with no inde­pen­dent life.

And it’s eas­ier to be impo­lite, curt, or short to an IV pole than to a real person.

~From Don’t Jet­ti­son Med­i­cine: Resus­ci­tate Your Pas­sion for the Career You Loved by Patri­cia Ray­mond MD with Robert A. Raymond

Tra­di­tional med­ical train­ing is built on a foun­da­tion of ‘pimp­ing,’ of aggres­sively get­ting in the face of your under­lings (there’s always some­one in the hier­ar­chy below you) and aggres­sively drilling them with ques­tions until inevitably the answer is not known.

And those of us trained in this fash­ion
did learn…
how to pick on those smaller than us.

If HCPs have a short­age of any­thing, it is time. Our society’s chrono-deficiency is quite acute. There seems to be insuf­fi­cient time for our patents, our fam­i­lies, and ourselves.

If we could get time in a bot­tle, HCPs would buy it up in 55-gallon drums. But that’s out.

That means triage. And triage means focus. And this is where you come in.

 ~From Don’t Jet­ti­son Med­i­cine: Resus­ci­tate Your Pas­sion for the Career You Loved by Patri­cia Ray­mond MD with Robert A. Raymond

After thirty-six hours on call, I finally made it home. I imme­di­ately rushed to the phone to call my par­ents. I had fig­ured out what I wanted to be when I grew up; as I was twenty-nine years old, it was about time.

My mom’s only ques­tion when I told her about my expe­ri­ence was …

“Honey, did it make your ears wiggle?”

~From Don’t Jet­ti­son Med­i­cine: Resus­ci­tate Your Pas­sion for the Career You Loved by Patri­cia Ray­mond MD with Robert A. Raymond