Product Description

Doctors on strike. Looming nursing shortages.
WhatÂ’s so tough about medicine?
We must heal our hemorrhaging profession now. But how?

This stimulating, humorous workbook is simply loaded with practical tactics to resuscitate your passion for medicine.

You will discover how to:
· Rejuvenate your idealism and wonder that led to your career in medicine
· Create loyalty and enthusiasm in your colleagues and staff
· Repurpose to take on medical challenges, one at a time
· Handle with ease the myriad challenges of our overloaded 1440 minute day
· Fill your prescription for a long, healthy, medical career

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2583724 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 168 pages

Review
"A book destined to become a classic in the revitalization of the medical profession." -- Stu Silverstein,MD Pediatrics Member American Medical Writers AssociationComedian and speaker on " Humor in Medicine??... You must be Joking"

"This book helps put the passion back in medicine." -- Barbara Bartlein, RN, LCSW, author of 'Why Did I Marry You Anyway?' and contributor to Chicken Soup for the Nurse's Soul

"A book destined to become a classic in the revitalization of the medical profession." -- Stu Silverstein,MD Pediatrics Member American Medical Writers AssociationComedian and speaker on " Humor in Medicine??... You must be Joking"

"This book helps put the passion back in medicine." --Barbara Bartlein, RN, LCSW, author of 'Why Did I Marry You Anyway?' and contributor to Chicken Soup for the Nurse's Soul

About the Author
Patricia L. Raymond, (BS MD FACP FACG), who is pleased to have achieved her prime goal in life of having more letters after her last name than in her last name, is the younger. Peeved that her brother got the chemistry, dissection, and the microscope sets while she had to make do with an Easy Bake™ oven, she set her sights early on a career in medicine. Undeterred despite psychologically scarring from an incident involving a partially dissected frog, "her spot" at the kitchen table, and a particularly gory chase scene (which she has not yet forgiven nor forgotten), she prevailed in the end and entered the field of gastroenterology with a mission to gross her brother out.She practices gastroenterology in Chesapeake, Virginia, and as Founder and President of Rx For Sanity™ humorously leads physicians and nurses to learn to Turn Care Inward™ first.

Robert A. Raymond, (BS BS), is an imaginative computer programmer. His ambitions lay in writing (whoÂ’s wouldnÂ’t, after a day pushing code?). He has completed a historic novel detailing the life of the Phoenician Princess Elisha, who fled a failed coup attempt in Tyre in 814 B.C. to found the city of Carthage only to later become a martyr on a pyre. His research included traveling to modern-day Tunisia to view the sites where much of the action took place. As Navy "brats", Robert and Patricia were moved to new duty stations every two years (including the Philippines and exotic New Jersey). In each location they created their own backyard worlds; concrete blocks became skyscrapers, desert tortoises were pets, and in every sandbox a city would find itself threatened by the volcanic garden hose eruption. DonÂ’t Jettison Medicine is his latest collaborative effort. As for the frog story: His sister seems to have done quite well for herself out of the incident. Career coaches get a paid a lot more for a lot less.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Stop Your Hemorrhage; Start to Wiggle!

Saving someone's life is like falling in love. The best drug in the world. For days, sometimes weeks afterwards, you walk the streets, making infinite whatever you see. Once, for a few weeks, I couldn't feel the earth -- everything I touched became lighter. Horns played in my shoes. Flowers fell from my pockets. –Frank Pierce, from the movie, Bringing out the Dead

Do you remember the feeling? Floating twenty-three feet above the ground after your first procedure, your first "save"? Likely you were a medical student, an intern. Remember in your early medical student days, when your unblemished white coat still sported those just-been-unfolded creases, how thrilled you were with every opportunity to interact with a patient, any patient?

Do you feel like that about your medical career now?

There are many reasons for your ‘thrill-o-penia’. You might have had one too many angry patients or one too many night shifts. One too many interrupted family moments. Another cost-cutting move by your hospital. Another regulation foisted upon you by the insurance industry or the government. A lawsuit. A bad clinical environment. Anything.

There is an old medical saying: all bleeding stops eventually. Either we heal or we die. In this context, death implies continuing on the same path -- disliking our career, practices, colleagues, and patients -- or quitting and walking away from all we have built.

Or, we can choose to heal.Many physicians now have concerns, even doubts, about our profession and our place in it. Sometimes, it’s easy to feel we have lost our way. We lose track of what brought us here.

I recently contemplated the reason I chose my medical specialty. Milton felt like my thirty-seventh admission that January night on call for Internal Medicine; a drunk, vomiting blood. I smelled him before I saw him, a mixture of distillery and slaughterhouse. The ICU room lights were off, and in the greenish light of the monitors, he glowed with an unearthly hue. There was more blood on him than in him. He was very successfully attempting to bleed to death.The room lights flashed on, temporarily blinding us. The GI fellow on call rattled in behind the endoscopy cart, briefly and efficiently examined Milton, and started in on his routine endoscopic ‘poke and choke’. I’d never seen anything like it before. Arching vermilion rainbows of blood splashing against a salmon pink mucosal sky. Undulating plump varices wending their way to the patient’s very soul. The musty smell of the melena, the crisp draw of the suction. It was amazing. And so beautiful. Really.The fellow quickly found the bleeding vessel, efficiently stopped the hemorrhage, pulled out the scope, and trundled off to bed. The fellow had done a routine procedure, Milt’d had his life restored, and I’d experienced a direct download from God.

After thirty-six hours on call, I finally made it home, and immediately rushed to phone my parents. I rhapsodized to my mother about the smells, the sounds, the blood, the save. My mom’s only question when I petered out was … "Did it make your ears wiggle?" Does it make your ears wiggle? That might sound strange to you, but in my family, we understand. To my mother, if your ears wiggle you are in your own unique place in the universe… your spot, your bliss. She was a realtor at the time, and wouldn’t sell you a house if you couldn’t honestly say that you ears wiggled as you walked up the front walk.

Gastroenterology and medicine did, and still do, make my ears wiggle today. The procedures, the interactions with the patients, the opportunity to educate. The beauty and peristaltic dance of the magnificent gastrointestinal tractHow about you? What about medicine made your ears wiggle?

So now it’s your chance. It’s time to tell your own story. Take a moment to think back beyond all the cranky patents, the tired partners, and the stressed staff. Do not think about where you are, only where you were when this was all new, back at the dawn of your career.Get out a pad of paper and a pen. Sit and think about these questions for five minutes before beginning. Answer each fully, as at least a brief essay, before moving on to the next.Ready to start?

Okay, let’s take a trip down memory lane.

What made you decide on a career in medicine? Recount the moment of your decision.

How did you decide what specialty of medicine you would enter? What ‘made your ears wiggle’ about it?

What excited you once you were in our profession? What aspect of medicine brought you the greatest happiness?

Good work. Look over your answers, from the point of view of the here-and-now. Do they still apply? Can you find that love for your profession again? Or has medicine become something you can no longer identify with?

Consider what you do verses what you said you loved. Maybe you can get yourself back into the part of the profession you enjoy. It could be as simple as shifting your duties and minimizing the part that doesn’t make you happy, to something as sweeping as changing careers to embrace the aspect of medicine for which you used to feel passion.We can’t provide answers, not to everyone. But we can illuminate possibilities.Let’s make your ears wiggle again.

Virginia Beach gastroenterologist, Patricia L. Raymond M.D. FACG is an author and consultant, who speaks to nurses and physicians through hospital systems and medical conventions. With her company Rx For Sanity, she humorously leads physicians and nurses to rediscover their joy in medicine and to learn to first "Turn Care Inward". Her book, "Don’t Jettison Medicine: Resuscitate Your Passion For The Career You Loved!" is available.

Customer Reviews

Important read for health-care professional
Reviewed by Dr. Letitia S. Wright, D.C. for Reader Views (5/06)

Dr. Patricia Raymond has created a workbook for Health Care Professionals who are facing burn out. Most of the public is not aware of the increasing number of physicians that are leaving their profession in every category. These are people who loved medicine and health care so much, that they made the sacrifices in their personal lives to become providers. Then out of sheer exhaustion, they leave the profession. This book contains 30 life saving strategies to help the professional put their lives in order and stay in their chosen profession.

This simply written book has exercises at the end of each chapter. Upon completion of the exercises, the reader will be clear on what areas need more work. Each chapter begins with a quote to illustrate the point. Exercise six's quote is from Annie Hall "... And I think what we go on our hands is a dead shark." Chapter six is on relationships.

Using Martin Buber's take on relationships being I and Thou, the author forces the reader to reconsider relationships on a personal level. By taking a look at all relationships (co-workers, office staff included), the reader has the opportunity to create a better working environment. The chapter on budgeting is extremely simplistic and should be used as a basic starting point because most people's lives are so complicated that a simple budget will not work for them. The shadow exercise is a great one. You get talk to the young version of yourself just becoming a health care provider. When you sit down and tell yourself what you would want yourself to know, it clears your mind to remember why you are in health care. It can also make it clear if it is time for you to get out of health care. Not every career and or should be saved. It's best for the health care professional to make that decision before litigation does that for them.