To Blog or Not to Blog?

This was the question a writing-inclined youngdoctor (UCSF palliative care fellow @lauraekoehn) and I faced recently. She had never blogged and felt ambivalent despite encouragement from our local GeriPal bloggerati, Eric Widera and Alex Smith. I blogged when my book...

Top 10 Doctor-Writers

aka Ten Doctor Writers Everyone Should Read Let me just start by acknowledging that top 10 lists are: absurd, biased, intriguing, powerful, useless, helpful, and ubiquitous – depending of course on the topic, its author, and you, its reader. Some of this author’s...

Telling Stories About Patients & Doctors

It’s now been 3 weeks, 3 days, and 33 hours since the launch of A History of the Present Illness and so far it seems that the book and its message are both resonating with patients and doctors, readers and writers, which is to say, it seems to be resonating with...

The Op-Ed

The Op-Ed is an interesting beast, not least because that shorthand is often thought to mean “opinion or editorial” when in fact it means “opposite the editorial page” (on that perhaps dying artifact known as a newspaper), and as it turns out...