The Optimized Doctor

• The Space to Listen In medicine, we learn to see what's visible—lesions, symptoms, signs. Mrs. Miller taught me to look for what isn't: the hidden lives that patients carry with them.
  Medscape Dermatology, March 21, 2025
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• Osler’s Advice and AI The question of whether AI is good for patients is moot: There would be no way to stop patients using it even if it were not.
  Medscape Dermatology, February 19, 2025
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• What We’ve Forgotten About Getting Well Modern medicine’s triumph over acute illness has been remarkable, but in focusing solely on disease elimination, we’ve forgotten the art of recovery.
  Medscape Dermatology, January 23, 2025
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• A Portrait of the Patient Viewing patients’ drawings can help build something called narrative competence, the "ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others."
  Medscape Dermatology, January 15, 2025
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• Doing the Best They Can When someone exhibits poor behavior, rather than assume they are being a jerk, try to find a more generous interpretation: Assume they are doing the best they can.
  Medscape Dermatology, November 14, 2024
• Rise of the Scribes AI scribes will be ubiquitous soon. With their use, a doctor can -- for the first time in a decade -- turn from the glow of a screen to actually face the patient.
  Medscape Dermatology, September 13, 2024
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• Healing Trauma As anyone who has lost a loved one to suicide knows, it is an unknowable, fatal disease.
  Medscape Dermatology, May 30, 2024
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• Is It Time to Air Grievances? 'Twas the night before Festivus and all through the house, everyone was griping.
  Medscape Dermatology, January 03, 2024
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• Life in the Woods "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach." – Henry David Thoreau
  Medscape Dermatology, December 08, 2023
• Suits or Joggers? A Doctor's Dress Code I used to wear a tie and shoes that could hold a shine. Now I wear jogger scrubs and sneakers. Rather than be offended by the lack of formality though, patients seem to appreciate it. Should they?
  Medscape Dermatology, December 04, 2023
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• The Differential Diagnosis You're Missing I often get requests for a second or third opinion, with hope that somehow, I'll discover a diagnosis that others missed. Sometimes, there's real diagnostic dilemmas; oftentimes, they're just itchy.
  Medscape Dermatology, September 28, 2023
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• Can We Be Too Efficient? Every day I look for ways to go faster. This is not so I can be out the door by 3. Rather, it's simply to make it through the day without having to log on after we put the kids to bed at night.
  Medscape Dermatology, August 30, 2023
• How to Become Wise "If life were a video game, I've not earned the wisdom level yet," Dr Jeffrey Benabio writes in his column this month.
  Medscape Dermatology, April 10, 2023
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• Could ChatGPT Write This Column? In this month's column, Dr Jeffrey Benabio writes about ChatGPT and asks, "Just how powerful is it?"
  Medscape Dermatology, February 22, 2023
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• The Loss of Letters "Upon my skinny, adaptable desk the other day sat a white envelope that was hand-addressed to me. It was postmarked more than 2 weeks before," Dr Jeffrey Benabio writes in his column.
  Medscape Dermatology, February 03, 2023
• Time for a Rest "I asked some docs when they thought this feeling of exhaustion first began. We agreed that the pandemic, doubledemic, tripledemic, backlog have taken a toll," Jeffrey Benabio, MD, MBA, writes.
  Medscape Dermatology, December 29, 2022
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• Sick Call 'We reached the high water mark for physicians calling out sick from my department this year. That's saying a lot. Our docs, like most, don't call out sick,' Dr Jeffrey Benabio writes in his column.
  Medscape Dermatology, November 23, 2022
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• The 'Root Cause' Visit Lately, the root cause visit seems to be on trend, Jeffrey Benabio, MD, writes in his column.
  Medscape Dermatology, October 27, 2022
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• Losing and Preserving Dignity "We push to reduce backlogs, offer same-time virtual care, work to reduce costs. We've driven medicine to the efficient and left little of the dignity it seems," observes Jeffrey Benabio, MD, MBA.
  Medscape Dermatology, September 28, 2022
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• Dig Like an Archaeologist "He was a fit man in his 40s. Thick legs. Maybe he was a long-distance walker?"
  Medscape Dermatology, August 22, 2022