The Voice of Reason

Well, 2.5 weeks have gone by in the internal medicine training program at Coney Island hospital. I’ve seen a lot of interesting patients which I can’t discuss due to HIPAA and I’ve got to do some procedures. I’m hoping over the next few weeks, I’ll get to do more but it is what it is. I’m learning a lot at times but it really seems like self-directed study. My residents are good about teaching the treatment protocols for the patients but you really have to push to get involved. A lot of times, all I can do is take a history (assuming the patient speaks English – there’s a huge Russian population here) which, at first, was fun but now it’s pretty routine. I could sit in a chair with my eyes closed and probably do it just as well. One thing I’m really missing is political and economic debate. When I was studying for Step 1, there was a lot of debate to be had with health insurance reform, Wall Street bailouts, etc. Now, that’s down to almost zero for me and I’m noticing how I’m missing those critical thinking skills. I’ve been thinking about volunteering with the DNC or a campaign on the weekends but I haven’t decided. However, I do want to start getting involved with politics and learning the laws and procedures. If law school were free, I’d probably do it at nights. Aside from medicine, it has always been one of the big three interests for me.

Finally, I want to get back into research. I’ve got some research ideas and I want to see about getting data from the hospital for my ideas. I know a couple things that would probably be easy to get published in a health policy journal (my field of research interest) or in a medical ethics journal.

Anyways, this is just an update since I haven’t written in so long. I think next time, I’ll discuss some policy ideas and maybe have an update on the research efforts. There are a lot of great papers to be written if I can just get the data. I always knew that background in business and statistics would come in handy sooner or later.

Filed under: Medicine, Personal/Life, Politics |