Do doctors really withdraw life support prematurely for patients with brain injuries?
Medicine is about life and death, a fact starkest when doctors advise families to end life support for a loved one. These decisions are routine…
Tag: Art of Medicine
Breaking my old habit of running late has been liberating: It’s extended my working life
Everyone has a different awareness of the passage of time. There are those who are always late, others who are always early, and some who…
Paternalism is bad but why do so many doctors expect me to mother my patients?
Sometimes we GPs can get quite attached to our patients. It’s probably no accident that many of us, having pursued a career based on helping…
‘Their experience was like the bud shops of Amsterdam’: GP flooded with recreational cannabis users asking for scripts
A few years ago, Dr Nic Giummarra felt he could make a real difference in his patients’ lives for the first time. A GP on…
Whack-a-mole medicine in an age of patients with alternative facts
Once upon a time, getting caught in a lie, especially a hand-in-the-cookie-jar one, carried consequences. Shame, maybe a grovelling apology. A promise to do better…
I don’t mind patients with lists, but double appointments grind my gears
In my twilight years of general practice, I’ve begun to be amused, rather than dismayed, by the patient who refers to a list of medical…
Why is it so hard to say no when patients demand unnecessary treatments?
We GPs are practical types. Not only do we like to tell people what to do, we also like having the skills to do things…
The idea that diagnostic certainty requires a ‘perfect’ medical history is flawed — let me explain
When I observe young GP registrars with patients, I see the immense weight they carry. I remember that feeling acutely: the pressure to make the…
Minister pledges to lift gag law that stops doctors broaching VAD with patients
Doctors will no longer risk being referred to AHPRA for raising voluntary assisted dying as an option for terminally ill patients under a Victorian Government…
Death by Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V? Copy–pasting of clinical notes ‘an epidemic’
Indiscriminate copy–pasting of clinical notes between records is causing “note bloat” and infecting records with errors, according to two papers in Internal Medicine Journal. A…
