Our country is blessed to have medical regulatory boards that serve to protect patients and their providers. Some other parts of the world do not require a license or special privileges. Those countries just want help from anyone willing, and it does not always end well. So, the United States has a blessing and a curse. Since ...

This week I've been scheduled on nights, and it's been a completely different ER experience. While many of the chief complaints are the same as what I've seen during the day in the ER, the pace has been different. There is no doubt that things can get just as hectic at night as they do during the day, but for the most part, things usually tend to ...

It's nearly the end of my final week here on my psychiatry rotation, and as I say my goodbyes to the patients I've grown close to over the last month, I'm feeling much differently than I'm used to. My preceptor made it clear on my first day to give my patients enough notice before my final day. She explained that students frequently come and go, ...

This week I’m learning the value of “being thrown into the fire” so to speak, as we often are as PA students in our second year. The rotation I am on now is notorious for being overwhelming, due not only to the great expectations of the students performance here, but also because of the sometimes 80 hour weeks, and lack of direction in ...

Last week I started my internal medicine subspecialty. One thing you will learn about a rotation schedule is that it is constantly changing. Originally I was supposed to be in pain management, then it switched to renal transplant, and now it is endocrinology. This month I am in a subdivision of endocrinology that specifically sees complex ...

On day 3 of my internal medicine outpatient rotation, I was discussing the results of a preventive cardiac study with a longtime established patient and how the supervising physician values these types of studies. Her response was, “That’s why I go to an internist.” I knew right then that all “internists” were not created equally. This rotation ...

I’m deep in my 3rd week of pediatrics and I am certainly feeling comfortable with my routine at the office. Now that I’ve had time to adapt to what life is like on clinical rotations, I’ve been able to enjoy the feeling of getting back to some sense of normalcy, being out in the working world and away from the classroom. While I still dedicate a ...

Inpatient psych has wrapped up, and now I begin psych-consult (more on that next week). Over the past couple of weeks, I have learned more about the “tough love” given in the hospital. Sometimes a patient is not capable of making helpful decisions. For instance, we had a gentleman who was very agitated and began pounding his fist into the floor. ...

If you are anything like me, familiarity offers immense comfort. When I enter a foreign environment without any idea of the routine, the faces or whether or not I can survive, I get a little uncomfortable. This would be about 75% of my rotations. However, if I know that what lies ahead is either somewhere I have been before or that there will be ...

With the last week of family medicine just ahead, I wanted to focus on the top 10 lessons learned from this rotation: 1. Lifestyle modification begins with us. We are not perfect by any means, but our patients look up to us. I have noticed how difficult it can be to counsel a patient about diet and exercise when the PA/NP/MD/DO is not ...