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THIS!!

THIS IS AN AMAZING WAY TO THINK OF CHRONIC PAIN

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I need male doctors to stop assuming women who have a chief complaint of fatigue are just being whiney. Things I have diagnosed in women just this week that were missed by male colleagues who saw them within the past month: magnesium of 0.9, AKI with creatinine of 2.8, anemia with hemoglobin of 5.8, thyroid cancer, and atrial fibrillation.

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In all honesty, fuck the liver

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People without medical training don’t know what they don’t know. You can have an exceptional amount of knowledge about specific things, especially conditions that affect you, but you do not understand the underlying mechanisms and interplay of different systems. You just can’t. I studied my ass off for seven years and spent the whole goddamn time doing reading and homework and practice and listening to lectures and watching videos, and I’m only DIMLY aware of how much I don’t know. And this is after my master’s in experimental psych and years working in research.

-How does an antidepressant work?

-What is normal flora for the vagina?

-What should blood pressure be?

You may think you know the answer to one or more of those questions. You might think it’s easy, or you might think it’s hard. You’d be wrong. No one knows the answers to any of those—not really. We have an absurd amount of knowledge about these subjects that takes years of education to even have the background to understand, and we don’t know. We’ve done research for decades on these questions. Very smart people have spent a lot of money and time on these questions. We. Don’t. Know. We have simplistic answers we give kids and surgeons, but we don’t actually know any of those things.

And that’s just the barest tip of the iceberg of what we don’t know. Modern medicine knows more than we ever have before by unbelievable orders of magnitude. And we know so little it’s like standing on the loneliest atoll in the ocean, staring out at the vast seas of our ignorance.

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It’s a very weird feeling to finally, after literal decades of working towards becoming an unstoppable juggernaut, finally find myself at a point where other people are also realizing that I’m becoming an unstoppable juggernaut. But they never see the potential still remaining! They look at me where I am at now, a rural doc who can change clinic policies that affect thousands of patients by virtue of being one of a handful of docs willing to work out here, and they say, wow, it’s so great that you’re using your influence like this! And I’m sitting here going you think this is IT? You think I’m going to stop here? You really think, after all that very literal blood and sweat and tears, I’m going to say, well, that’s enough. I got one clinic to do a training. I wrote a couple of articles. I got a few doctors to reconsider their approaches. Hell no! I’m still climbing. I’m still pushing. I’m consolidating my solid ground. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the short-sightedness of so much ambition—do you have any idea how much you hamstring yourself by it? Give yourself time! Give yourself ten years, twenty years, thirty years. Build something massive. Build a fortress that a few weak slings and arrows can’t take down. I put in the work every day since I started med school right and a half years ago, I’ve made myself virtually unfireable, and I’m still at the beginning of my career. It isn’t sexy to show up every day and do the petty and menial tasks as well as the grand ones, to eat shit from smug old white straight cis men who think having a cardiologist AND an orthopedist on a committee counts as “diversity,” to have to plan when you can cry and when you can poop to avoid making your team angry—but now I’m the fucking attending. Now I get to say, “I want it like this,” and people listen. I get to start righting some of these massive systemic wrongs—just little ones, tiny ones. But if I start working on the pipelines for rural docs, for people of color who want to be doctors, on opinion pieces that a small handful of people read, on textbook chapters used to train a new generation how to think, on residency policies, I can start chipping away at this huge edifice of Modern Medicine that once seemed impenetrably white and male and straight and cis. I trained with a trans woman who’s a doctor now. I trained with a non-binary doctor in residency. My residency class had more doctors of color than white doctors. Things ARE changing and they are changing because we MAKE them change. Because we show up every day with a ball peen hammer, like Andy Dufresne at Shawshank, and we are chiseling our way to toppling this edifice. The more I work, the longer I build up this social capital, the more people in the community I make nice with, the more I network, the bigger the changes I can make.

Years ago in residency I wrote a poem and I said “I am throwing my whole life against the glass to see it shake”—we worked on the ninth floor, with huge windows, in an oddly squalid wing—and I am still doing that. It’s wild and joyful. See what change I can make. Fling myself at it. Throw myself at the ground and miss.

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This ABSOLUTELY works.

I have used this for many years. Definitely b do it.

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one of my beloved friends (very autism) was in.. not denial but ignorance sounds mean. but that abt themself last time you brought up the raads r test so i sent it to the gc (full of autism) and they were like psh. fake test no one could get below 100. they know now but i think about it so much

The thing is. When you take the autism test. And you see your score is in the 100 to 160 range. You think. Oh this is probably the middle? Middle autism. Tinge of autism. Your relatives calling you bright but shy autism. Just a whiff of autism. And then you see the score ranges. And you go. This test is lying to me there is absolutely no way the majority of people score under 65. The 65 number is such a low cutoff and so many of these experiences are clearly universal a score under 65 is something they made up in a lab. People who score under 65 are obviously scoring just under that mark from 59 to 64 and they’re also obviously lying or purposely misrepresenting their experiences as less severe than they are. And then you find out there are real people who get a 20 or 30 or 7 on it. And you go. Ah

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In the interest of science (and defeated by my curiosity) I actually looked up the above insect. And NO I will NOT be providing pictures. Trust me. Don't Google it if you wanna have a good night's sleep

Just know that this species is endemic to Australia. So you can kind of imagine a stick like insect and multiply it by your average Australian Species Size Difference™ scale and get an idea 😂(yeah I just made that term up lmao)

I’m at the american association for zoo veterinarians conference this week and they’re having an official shooting competition (with prizes) to determine who is the best with a dart gun… this is the best academic conference I’ve ever attended

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Long time no post 😔 currently slogging through more study materials. days are passing by in the blink of an eye 📚📖☕🖊️📝 // 17092022

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Sometimes studying feels like drinking soup with a fork.

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One of the doctors I look up to posted about feeling inadequate and disappointing many people when she chooses her family over her career and she is one of the most famous, most awarded, most stellar, most accomplished doctors I know

Guess it just goes to show that you'll end up disappointing people no matter what you do so 🤷‍♀️

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Congrats!!! You made it!! It's absolutely a thing to celebrate, don't be nonchalant at ALL!! Yell and jump around and shout it from a rooftop if you want to, because it IS worth it 😊💖 5 year old you must be doing so inside you ahaha 😋 all the hard work and pain and tears finally paid off!

Wishing you all the best for the journey ahead! 👍🙌

Hey studyblr/medblr family

I got my final exam results yesterday. And I did it. I’m a doctor now. There’s Dr in front of my name now. And I still can’t wrap my head around it. I’m getting goosebumps as I type this. I really did it. I’m trying to be nonchalant about it but I just know the 5 year old me who dreamed of this day is so proud. Albeit the journey wasn’t at all like how the 5 year old pictured it lol. But here we are. And my parents, especially my father, are so proud of me. It makes my heart glow.

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When you successfully deal with an issue on call without having to ask your senior resident what to do and you suddenly realize you’ve learned some medicine and gained a tiny bit of confidence

I am just a tiny idiot but sometimes I know a couple things 🤷🏼‍♀️