Medicine can be inspiring and infuriating

Doctors share joys and frustrations in 'On Being a Doctor 3'

PHILADELPHIA, August 17, 2007 - Doctors' observations of their patients and everyday experiences in medicine can be inspiring, tragic, infuriating, funny, or poignant. The American College of Physicians, the nation's largest medical specialty organization, has published a compilation of stories, essays, and poems by doctors and their patients, "On Being a Doctor 3."

"Doctors tell of the often dysfunctional, sometimes wonderful, world we live in," write co-editors Christine Laine, MD, MPH, FACP, and Michael A. LaCombe, MD, MACP, in their introduction. "Reading these stories will help you see why, despite these challenges, most doctors would not dream of doing anything else."

Some stories depict particular patients (whose identities are protected) and others portray characters that are composites of people whom physicians have encountered in medical training, in practice, or in their daily lives. Other stores are written by patients themselves.

The writings first appeared in the On Being a Doctor section of the ACP journal Annals of Internal Medicine. Drs. Laine and LaCombe, who select and edit works for the section, chose 111 pieces for this third On Being a Doctor compilation. (The first two volumes were published in 1995 and 1999.)

The works are arranged into eight chapters: On Society and the World Around Us; On Becoming a Doctor; On Being a Patient; Balancing the Personal and Professional; Those Who Are Our Patients; On Aging; On Death and Dying; and Hospital, Health Systems, Contentions.

Some examples:

• The patient in an Indian slum hospital who won't leave when discharged. The doctor can't understand why, until he sees the man's two children hidden under the bed, feasting on hospital food
  
  
• The physician hugging her children and crying at the end of a workday that included being stuck by the needle of an HIV-positive patient. She instinctively pulls back, fearing a chance the virus could be transmitted through her tears
  
  
• The closeted gay medical student who can't let on that he recognizes the AIDS patient on whom he and his colleagues are making hospital rounds
  
  
• The doctor witnessing an epidemic of drug abuse who writes in the poem "OxyContin": "Top of her class / with nothing but promise ahead / until hi-jacked by / the torment of needle and spoon."; and
  
  
• The "trouble with medical students," according to the poem of a mentoring physician, is "...they are young... full of possibility, full of questions you have stopped asking..."