A good Doctor is also a bit of a Nurse....

When doing the morning rounds, we routinely look for the I/O chart, how many times have we stopped to think if the charting is accurate. How about the Postural BP? or the respiratory rate? Not finding fault with our nightingales' but just to highlight a fact that, what ever job the Nurses do, Doctors are supposed to have an idea too.

When it comes to taking care of our patient's in most parts of the world, 'Doctor' by default is the leader of the team. And a good leader never says "It's not my job" or never has an I'm-the-guy-who-does-his-job-you-must-be-the-other-guy attitude. There are many times we set IV plugs, many times, give first-dose IV antibiotics, amidst loads of other 'more important changes'; things of importance can at times be rather relative. What is important to one person may not be important to another. What is important to a doctor, is not important to a nurse and vice versa. It is important to pot the patient 3 - 4 times daily rather than leaving them on diapers. It is also important to make the patients sit out of bed, talking to them, engaging them while feeding etc. But how many of us can claim that we ensure these things for the patients, when all you do is worry who is going to fall next, or which patient is going to complain...

In such hostile and tense circumstances the least you can do is not add stress to your colleagues.... Doctors to Nurses and the other way around.... Be kind to each other.... Afterall we are all working for the patients and all of us want to do the best for our patients like we would, if one of the patients were a loved one. Each and every patient is also someone's mother, sister, wife or daughter and are very special people to some people in the world.... just because they are demented or functionally declined they do not cease to be "human beings" capable of experiencing love or expressing love...

Sometimes I wonder, on the final Judgement Day we will not be judged based on how many differential diagnoses we made or how few complaints we had against our name or how rich we were or if we had 1000+ friends on facebook, but rather on how many lives we touched, how many souls that came along our way were comforted, how many broken hearts we gave our ear to listen to.... When we put things in this kind of a perspective I don't think there is any reason for silly fights between Nurses and Doctors, after all, we are part of one team.

Why do we even care...!

Was just wondering today like many other days... What does it take to be an efficient Doctor? Is someone who can elicit an excellent detailed history, does a thorough examination and arrives at the most probable diagnosis and starts the most appropriate treatment counted as an Efficient Doctor? Many a times, in spite of doing all the things mentioned before, our patients are not satisfied with the treatment. Is it because most of the patients come from non-medical backgrounds and are not in a position to understand the effort taken to help them? May be yes, and no. There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, at best they can only be speculated.

As doctors, numerous times we fail to see the patient as a person and rather look at them with our biases which influence the way we talk and interact with our patients; from a very academic perspective we want to be as accurate as possible in our approach and the medical outcome... and many a times miss the forest for the woods... It is definitely a necessary quality to be academic and do the right thing at the right time, there is no doubt about that. What I also feel is important is listening to our patients as human beings and not as sophisticated people with an array of drugs, diagnostic tests and therapeutic procedures at our disposal, which are intimidating rather than reassuring the patients and their loved ones, and many a times manifests as "tension".

Developing a "connection" with patients is as important as being good academically, in order to be successful, if you define it (success) in terms of not getting harassed by patients or their relatives.

A genuine concern for the patients and their wellbeing will never let us be stressed, even if you have had a physically taxing day...

Descriptive Geometry

Welcome to Tan90!

This is similar to a sound check that happens prior to the performance...

I've been thinking of having a new blog since a long time, just to capture the thoughts that cross the mind sometimes thought aloud and dashing off into tangents of infinite lengths or perpendicular depths (tan90=infinity)....

A small bit to explain the title of this entry....

Descartes was a brilliant guy, he lay down in bed thanks to his illness and stared at the ceiling all day, especially the corners, where the walls met the ceiling. He lay there watching spiders crawl on the walls and came up with the idea of describing the creature's position using the three lines, where the walls met the ceiling, as coordinates... then he continued with describing not just points, but lines and curves and all sort of funny stuff which lets you communicate images with words with exact precision, imagine saying stuff like "y=mx+c is a straight line"... wouldn't that be simply cool in good ol' days... Yeah, images with words... quite similar to poetry... Poetry at its best...

Let's begin drawing tangents!