The Urban Resident

Tag: medicine

  • Failing Faithfully: The Futility of Medicine (Scholar’s Compass)

    It was stunning news. I listened with disbelief as my colleague described how a patient of ours, in whom we had uncovered a host of serious diseases over a few years, was now newly diagnosed with cancer after an incidental scan. In addition, his social supports had been eroded and I thought about what it would…

  • Helping People Is Not Enough

    [This is the second post in a series on becoming a Christian physician, originally written for the ESN blog. The series began with Do You Want to Be a Doctor?] “Why do you want to work in healthcare?” “I want to help people.” This dialogue is the most common conversation people will have about a…

  • Hands and Feet

    Hands and Feet

    [This was originally written years ago for a Christian campus publication, Revisions. It is one of my favorite reflections and will appear on the ESN blog tomorrow.] The patient came in for a refill of pain medications even though it was his first visit to the family medicine practice. The front desk staff had a letter…

  • Selection Bias: Statistical Integrity in Christian Community

    Originally a guest post for the Emerging Scholars Network (a ministry of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship):   One day a num­ber of con­cerned moth­ers met with the min­is­ter to express their frus­tra­tion and anger over the unseemly con­duct of a par­tic­u­lar boy in Sun­day School. They did not want their chil­dren exposed to this child and…

  • Reasons [Reprise]

    Note: Originally written several years ago. My mom looks for Reasons the way some people look for spare change on the ground.  She always has an eye out for them, an ear cocked to hear the faintest whisper of a consequence or a lesson.  Most were simple illustrations of basic character: an irritating person was…

  • Rituals of Annotation

    I am not exactly sure of what prompted me to do it, but I began keeping a tally of all the pronouncements I have done.  I never really knew this before, but pronouncements are done in a remarkably simple and impersonal way.  Most patients who die in the hospital do not go with a bang…