Month: December 2015

Categories
General Lifestyle

Medical Grind

It’s 6 a.m. and your hand doesn’t quite make it to the alarm clock before the voices in your head start telling you it’s too early, too dark, and too cozy to get out of a bed.

Another voice says that there’s a reason your alarm is going off. You take a deep breath, sit up, put your feet on the floor, and get to work.

This is the grind. You have a commitment. The words normal and comfortable have been traded for unexpected and demanding. You’re in a fight towards a finish line without a ribbon and the reward outweighs any medal around your neck.

On this journey to achieve a challenging goal, it’s OK to negotiate with yourself. You’ve wanted to quit many times, but you don’t surrender. Believe the voice that says “it’s OK you didn’t do as well on that exam” or “you will eventually get through to your noncompliant patient” and “you can survive these last two hours on shift.”

Keep focused on what it takes to reach the next step in the journey. Now that you’ve headed down this path, the transformation is taking place. Don’t lose heart. Remember that this is the grind.

Featured image:
vintage alarm clock / thermometer by H is for Home

Categories
General Lifestyle

Let’s do Better for our LGTBQIA Patients

A special thanks to the panelists and physician who inspired this article.

Recently, I was involved in a collaboration between the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA) and the American Student Medical Association (AMSA) at my school to help our students learn more about the LGBTQIA population. To clarify, this community includes individuals identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex or asexual. We invited a board-certified OB/GYN and reproductive endocrinologist to our school, along with a few of his patients. The LGBTQIA patient population has its own unique set of challenges and understanding their struggle is vital.

Unfortunately, many members of this community have anecdotes of times in which they were disrespected, turned away, or not understood by medical professionals. One of the transgender panelist had difficulty finding a fertility physician who was willing to work with him and his wife to have him carry their child. Yes, you heard me correctly. This panelist was willing to go off testosterone in efforts to regain his menstrual cycle and carry his baby. Many physicians were unwilling to assist this couple. These stories have to be put to an end; we can do better. I hope we can challenge ourselves to be more open-minded and accepting of all those who seek our help. It’s not a physician’s job to deem what is right or wrong; rather, it is our job to serve our patients in whatever capacity we can.

Having a patient panel allowed us to hear some moving and emotional stories from these brave people. I hope other LGBTQIA members can share some of their stories with medical students around the nation because it is important for us to hear these first-hand. In addition to hearing about fertility challenges and life paths, we also heard of changes we as physicians can make to better serve this patient population. I felt the need to share these with others because I realize many students never get the chance to have an open conversation with someone who identifies as part of this community.

  1. On medical intake forms, leave the sex and gender fields blank so the patient can feel comfortable telling you his or her identity here, rather than only giving them two choices.
  2. Ask the patient what his or her preferred name is. Some patients are transitioning and may not prefer their given name.
  3. Ask the patient his or her preferred pronoun and make note of this. The last thing we want to do is keep referring to someone as “she” if they have never felt like a she.
  4. Connect with the LGBTQIA community. Unfortunately, many of these patients face discrimination. Even though it seems “sufficient” to just accept them when they come to our practice, we can do more. The patients on the panel expressed that it would be nice for physicians to reach out to their community and let them know you are welcoming to their group and want to serve them. If one of your patients happens to identify as part of this community, ask them if they can connect you to other people who may need care.
  5. If you have a patient who wants to transition, be sure to at least mention fertility issues. Someone transitioning may not have thought about having a family yet, but it can be very difficult to go off hormones and later become pregnant (if transitioning from female to male). In addition, the patient panelists mentioned that it would have been nice to know more about egg and sperm donation and the costs and barriers associated with those processes. Obviously we don’t need to push our patients in either direction when it comes to transitioning, because it is their choice. But it is our job to inform them and help them understand the potential issues that may arise if they do decide to transition at a younger age.

It is difficult to learn about this population because each member is different and unique. In a struggle to find medically relevant information for health care providers, I found two good resources I found for more information are from American Medical Association (AMA) and AMSA. Click the links below to find out more about the LGBTQIA population in the medical context:

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/about-ama/our-people/member-groups-sections/glbt-advisory-committee/glbt-resources.page?http://www.amsa.org/advocacy/action-committees/gender-sexuality/

Featured image:
Pride Flag 1 by Ant Smith

Categories
General Public Health Reflection

Are you listening? Using the doctor-patient relationship to curb community violence.

If you’ve paid attention to the news recently, you might share my concern that mass shootings are becoming a normalized part of American culture. According to data collected by the United Nations, America leads the developed world in firearm homicides.[1] As a college student in Washington, DC, social justice was an inextricable part of my education. I volunteered, protested, and campaigned for issues I felt strongly about. Assuming you weren’t a student in our nation’s capital, let me tell you that these are all pretty typical parts of the DC college experience. In fact, my zeal for progressivism in the arenas of health and wellness contributed to my desire to become a physician. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until two of my friends were murdered within six weeks of each other this summer that I felt compelled to take a closer look at how, as a medical student, I could better integrate my passion for social justice into my education and clinical practice.

As medical students, our education becomes our lifestyle. It’s demanding, consuming, and vigorous. My support system likes to remind me that I’m not Atlas and that I can’t hold the weight of the world on my shoulders. They tell me to keep my nose in a book and stay focused on my studies. It’s difficult for me to comply with these directives when I feel like I’m neglecting the part of myself that is aware of the world beyond medical school. It took this summer’s tragedies to remind me that even as a student doctor, I need to hold myself accountable for working to reduce social injustice, particularly community violence. What I’ve realized is that while my activism efforts may not reflect those I experienced as a college student, I can still make simple adjustments in my current practice to potentiate positive change.

Since this summer, one of the modifications I made, in an effort to merge my medical and activist identities, is to ask my patients to rate their stress on a scale of one to ten when I take their social history. On the surface, this might not seem like a significant exercise. After all, I’ve been asking my patients about their life stressors since I started school last year. What I realized is that while most people can easily spout off a list of things that make them feel strained (bills, student loans, family responsibilities, looming deadlines, etc.), it’s an entirely different exercise to ask patients to evaluate their stress from a holistic perspective. Though this practice correlates stress level to a numerical value, I have found that I can actually get a better qualitative picture of a patient’s mental and emotional wellbeing and self-awareness by using the one-to-ten stress scale. Perhaps by using this scale, we will be able to gain awareness of and provide support for struggling patients before they feel compelled to turn towards violence.

I encourage you to employ the one-to-ten stress scale into your history taking routine in the hope that it can open the door to bigger, more important conversations about wellness and lifestyle with our patients. Please feel free to let me know how the scale works for you. I look forward to spending the rest of my medical career advocating for those who are underserved by the medical community, but for now, I hope that having these conversations can be a first step in helping patients deal with problems before they resort to violence. In the weeks and months that have followed the deaths of my friends, I find myself thinking a lot about the people who committed the violent acts that claimed their lives. I wonder if they had medical professionals in their lives who they felt comfortable talking to, and I wonder what they would have said if we, the medical community, had been listening.

References:

  1.  Global Study on Homicide. (2011). United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. https://www.unodc.org/documents/congress/background-information/Crime_Statistics/Global_Study_on_Homicide_2011.pdf

Featured image:
Brother by Fabrizio Rinaldi

Categories
Clinical Lifestyle Public Health

A League of Randomized Clinical Trials

Frontline recently reported on data released from Boston University and the Department of Veterans Affairs demonstrating that out of 91 former National Football League (NFL) players, 87 had Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE).  This degenerative brain disease is believed to be the result of repetitive head trauma, and can lead to memory and mood disorders. [1] It is unclear why the disease develops in some players but not others.

The findings of the above study come with several limitations.  In particular, the gold standard for CTE diagnosis is examination of brain tissue postmortem.  The data comes from players who were concerned during their lifetimes that they showed symptoms of the degenerative disease and arranged, upon death, to donate their bodies and brains for analysis.  As a result, the prevalence of CTE suggested by the data may be skewed due to selection bias.  The brains examined post-mortem came from athletes already concerned about CTE because of their clinical symptoms, making it much more likely that the investigators would find evidence of the disease.  The ongoing work at Boston University and the Department of Veterans Affairs is a retrospective analysis that cannot determine the cause of CTE.  It is important, however, for the identification of factors that are correlated with the disease, which may spark more interest and lead to more focused research on the topic.  Even so, the disease was present in 96% of those who were tested.  This finding is both remarkable and eye-opening.  It demonstrates a real concern for athletes in contact sports like football.

Organized football poses a risk of concussions.  Chris Borland was a college linebacker and All-American drafted into the NFL in the third round in 2014. Although he only had two diagnosed concussions, one during eighth-grade soccer, and the other playing high-school football, he estimates that the actual number is closer to thirty. On March 13, 2015, Borland retired from the league via email. [2] He has since described the move as preventive and outlined his determination to prevent the degeneration of his own brain.  The NFL is aware of the risk posed by concussion and has focused on decreasing the rate of this injury.  In their 2015 Health & Safety Report, the NFL published a thirty-five percent decrease in regular-season concussions from 2012. [3] According to the data shared with Frontline, however, forty percent of those determined to have CTE were offensive and defensive linemen, players who have repetitive, sub-concussive hits on nearly every play. [1] This suggests that recurrent, lower-intensity blows may also lead to CTE.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is not unique to football players. It can be seen in other athletes, military veterans, epileptics, abuse victims, and circus performers who are shot out of cannons. [4] The scientific and medical communities should not delve into the controversy of any alleged cover-ups as discussed in the Frontline documentary A League of Denial. [5] Rather, our focus should be on furthering research, because our understanding of this condition is still in its infancy.

Rates of CTE in the general population or even in the professional football community have not yet been established.  The gold standard of scientific experimentation, the double-blinded, randomized controlled trial is not an ethical or practical possibility in this case.  Players without symptoms of CTE must be analyzed to allow for characterization of healthy persons as well as sub-clinical disease.  This may help identify why some people are afflicted with the condition and not others.  Those who suspect they may have CTE should be granted medical care and follow-up to help the scientific community better understand the degenerative progression of the disease.  Research should not be limited to professional athletes, as college and even younger athletes may be at risk of developing CTE.  It also should not be limited to football, as head trauma occurs in many sports.  It is important for professional organizations and sports fans to support research and efforts to implement relevant safety measures to preserve the health of their favorite athletes and to enhance the quality of the sports they enjoy.

References:

  1. Breslow, J. (2015, September 18). New: 87 Deceased NFL Players Test Positive for Brain Disease. Retrieved September 20, 2015.
  2. Fainaru, S., & Fainaru-Wada, M. (2015, August 21). Why former 49er Chris Borland is the most dangerous man in football. Retrieved September 20, 2015.
  3. 2015 NFL Health and Safety Report. (2015). Retrieved September 20, 2015, from http://static.nfl.com/static/content/public/photo/2015/08/05/0ap3000000506671.pdf
  4. Hanna, J., Goldschmidt, D., & Flower, K. (2015, October 11). 87 of 91 tested ex-NFL players had brain disease linked to head trauma. Retrieved October 12, 2015.
  5. Frontline. (2013). League of denial: The NFL’s concussion crisis [Motion picture]. United States: PBS

Featured image:
Football 10.18.08 by Mike Hoff

Categories
MSPress Announcements

100th MSPress Blog Post

We have reached the 100th MSPress Blog post! This publication established the MSPress as an active international publishing group. The first MSPress piece published was posted via our blog on March 30th, 2014, kick-starting the scholarly expression of medical students worldwide.

Since then, the MSPress Blog has grown tremendously. Beginning with two medical students, we are now a team of over 80 editors, writers, and reviewers. What started as a collaboration between the University of Rochester SOM and University of Central Florida COM, now also includes schools such as: Johns Hopkins, Brown, Cardiff (UK), Case Western, Cornell, Georgetown, and the University of Zagreb and University of Split (Croatia).

Our platform has enabled medical students from across the world to collaborate and express their talents, experiences, and passions in a broad array of fantastic publications. A few MSPress Blog pieces that exemplify our diverse works include:  Stephanie Wang’s reflective “Poem about Pain”, and Gunjan Sharma’s plea for more humanity in dealing with patients in “Dear Doctor“, Aryan Sarparast’s exuberant and perceptive slam poetry video on imposter syndrome, and Tony Sun’s pieces drawing parallels between Moby Dick and medical school. The quality of the MSPress Blog is in a large part due to the dedication and passionate work of Dr. Marija Kusulja, The MSPress Blog Associate Editor. Thanks to Dr. Kusulja and the rest of our team, our posts are reaching an ever expanding audience!

We thank you for your continued support as a member of the MSPress community. We look forward to the promising future of the MSPress and the expression of medical student dialogue and research through open-access publishing.

Gabriel Glaun

The Medical Student Press, Co-Founder and Executive Editor

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