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As a physician who cares for hundreds of patients with heart failure every year, I’m frequently humbled when, despite my best efforts, patients shuttle between hospital and home. I track the [...]

It was the most important thing I would do that week. One morning, I walked around the hospital introducing myself to patients. I stopped by the room of a woman in her late 80s with dementia. Her [...]

How should you live when you know you’re going to die? It is perhaps the ultimate, eternal question — one we all have to grapple with, but mercifully, don’t have to, until the end is crystallized [...]

Among my first memories as a doctor was a disheveled man, barely older than me, handcuffed to a hospital bed, vomiting a thin brown liquid into a pale pink bucket. Between retches, he sobbed and [...]

How much should your medicine cost? A physician colleague recently told me the story of a patient who asked if she could put off taking her medication until the end of the month, after she [...]

I’ve never cared for a Hmong child, but I often think about what it would be like. The summer before we started medical school, I and other students were advised to read Anne Fadiman’s “The [...]

On my last night of residency, a friend and I swapped our most memorable stories. We recalled the nights of panic and triumph caring for dozens of critically ill patients, about the day — okay, [...]

For years, doctors have been told to look at the patient — not the computer — when providing medical care. What we haven’t been told is what to do when there’s only a computer. Telemedicine is [...]

As I was deciding whether to intubate my new patient — a 23-year-old man, ravaged by cancer, clearly struggling to breathe — his mother handed me two envelopes. In broken English, she urged me to [...]

When I first met my patient, I didn’t know why he’d been vomiting. It turned out to be for the worst reason. He’d been losing weight and energy for months. He’d occasionally seen blood in the [...]