Burnout and physician wellness are two sides of the same coin. With the use of journaling, one can flip the coin with the odds in their favour. Burnout, a prevalent term in emergency medicine, is defined as a mix of emotional exhaustion, lack of control, and depersonalization.1 Importantly, studies demonstrate that 65% of emergency physicians may experience burnout for a portion of their career1. This staggering rate is, in fact, more than double the …
A letter to my younger self
I recently took an extended vacation at the end of residency, and had some time to reflect upon nearly an decade of medical training. I write this as an letter to my younger, naive self, in hopes that trainees may learn from my experiences. Dear PGY-1 Shahbaz, I have some big news for you: things are going to change. Don’t bother memorizing the SIRS criteria, its going to be gone in a few years. …
Lessons Learned in Academic Scholarship
During my PGY-4 year, I had the opportunity to pursue a specialization in Academic Scholarship.1 My year had two primary components: (1) I was the inaugural Editorial Intern at the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine,2 and; (2) I was the Digital Scholars Fellow at CanadiEM.3 Over the course of the year, I learned many lessons about publishing in academics. I wanted to share three of the most pertinent lessons with our community to …
Dr. Google isn’t the colleague you’d like it to be
“Well, I looked up my symptoms on Google, and it said I was having a heart attack”, we’ve all had this patient interaction before. We live in an era where information is so freely and easily accessible. The danger comes in determining the intrinsic accuracy of data. An recent study has suggested that researching symptoms online is more likely to make one feel worse, and less informed. While this is of no surprise to …
A lesson on blood and bullets for Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum is clearly in need of a biology lesson following his puzzling assertion that the youth who filled Washington’s streets in protest of America’s infamously lax gun laws would have better spent their time learning cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), in case a shooting were to occur in their high school. “How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to …
Narrative Medicine and Resilience in Emergency Medicine
How do we treat suffering? It’s simple enough to trawl the depths of wisdom collected in Rosen’s. Journal clubs, podcasts, and blogs keep us abreast of the latest updates to evidence-based practice. There is no substitute for the experience gained on clinical shifts. Reading around cases we see in the Emergency Department helps. We may struggle to memorize every list, table, and pathway, but the material itself is pretty straightforward. It’s all laid …