Brian T. Maurer, PA-C

Dr. Rafael Campo, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an award-winning poet, says, "Poetry does a better job in teaching because it is about embracing the human aspect of suffering, not just knowing how many lymph nodes are positive and where the pain is on a 1-to-10 scale."

I watch them go—a new family I will most likely never see again. They've played by the rules, but got burned by the system. Lose your job, lose your health insurance, lose your doctor.

When I was an undergraduate student during those final years of the Vietnam conflict, the draft was still on; and young men were called to military service. I elected to enlist in the U.S. Coast Guard to fulfill my military obligation.

Some things grow more quickly than others, and sometimes we have the chance to weed the garden before it's too late.

It isn't that clinicians are totally thoughtless people. In many instances they just never learned to appreciate what it might be like to stand in the patient's shoes.

A recent JAMA commentary advocates the referral of morbidly obese children to state protective service agencies in cases where their families fail to achieve effective weight reduction. I suspect that such an approach would prove to be marginally effective at best and more than likely result in further treatment failures.

One advantage of having grownup children is that you can reap the benefits of their curiosity. Even though they carry 50% of your DNA, they don't necessarily subscribe to the same political party or publications that you do. They also don't necessarily read the same books; but then, when they find a keeper, they're more than willing to pass it along.

I watch them walk down the hallway, this woman I have known as a mother, now as a grandmother, whose grandson still has a great grandmother of his own.

A visit from an 8-year-old patient reminds the author that in medicine as in the natural world, every seed germinates in its own time.

As I finish the auscultatory exam of a patient's heart, lungs or abdomen, I nonchalantly pop the stethoscope out of my ears and toss it over my head onto the nape of my neck, where it comes to rest across my shoulders. The diaphragm and bell drape down on one side of my chest, the earpieces hang suspended on the opposite side.