Friday Reflections

Launched in July 2022, Sensible Medicine is a Substack newsletter for people interested in medicine, health policy, outcomes, human biology, drug development, translational science, medical ethics, and science communication. All of Dr. Cifu’s contributions to the site can be found here.

Dr. Cifu writes a series of reflections on medicine.

• Friday Reflection 1: My First Patient

• Friday Reflection 2: The Pain You Know

• Friday Reflection 3: The Days of the Giants

• Friday Reflection 4: Days of Leaves, Trees, and Forests

• Friday Reflection 5: Well, That Could Have Gone Better

• Friday Reflection 6: Abrogating our Responsibility to Use Placebos

• Friday Reflection 7: Eavesdropping in Medical Education

• Friday Reflection 8: Physician Mourning

• Friday Reflection 9: It Is Hard to Die Well

• Friday Reflection 10: The Worst Family Meeting

• Friday Reflection 11: Physician Acculturation: Knowledge, Responsibility, Experience, and Humor

• Friday Reflection 12: This Job Might Just Kill Me

• Friday Reflection 13: Empathy Earned and Learned

• Friday Reflection 14: Committing and Avoiding Medical Errors

• Friday Reflection 15: Of Medicine, Baseball, and Other Distractions

• Friday Reflection 16: The Evolution of a Stable Practice

• Friday Reflection 17: The Grace of the Dying

• Friday Reflection 18: An Homage to Mentors

• Friday Reflection 19: A Pledge That Can be Hard to Honor

• Friday Reflection 20: The Clinical Set Point

• Friday Reflection 21: Revealing Ignorance

• Friday Reflection 22: The Memory Binder

• Friday Reflection 23: The Ghost Patient Panel

• Friday Reflection 24: I Would Rather Go Back in Time

• Friday Reflection 25: The Advice I’d Like to Give a Student Entering Medical School

• Friday Reflection 26: General Internal Medicine in the Time of COVID

• Friday Reflection 27: The Poor Historian

• Friday Reflection 28: Four of the Things Patients Have Taught Me

• Friday Reflection 29: The Totally Predictable Doctor as Patient Essay

• Friday Reflection 30: Thirty Years and Counting

• Friday Reflection 31: Senses, Memories, and Medicine

• Friday Reflection 32: The Trauma of Not Dying Alone

• Friday Reflection 33: Making Your Doctor Laugh

• Friday Reflection 34: Disagreement and Chagrin in Therapeutic Decision Making

• Friday Reflection 35: Four Who Fired Me

• Friday Reflection 36: Why Don’t Doctors Want to See Patients?

• Friday Reflection 37: Why I Teach (acceptable and less acceptable reasons)

• Friday Reflection 38: Yesterday’s Solutions; Today’s Problems

• Friday Reflection 39: What to Expect When You Are Aging

• Friday Reflection 40: Power

• Friday Reflection 41: Sometimes I Just Need to Complain

• Friday Reflection 42: Patient Approaches to a Doctor’s Visit

• Friday Reflection 43: The Absence of Reassuring Counterfactuals in Clinical Medicine

• Friday Reflection 44: Diagnostic Enigma

• Friday Reflection 45: Patients

• Friday Reflection 46: The Best of Days

• Friday Reflection 47: Patients Make the Hardest Decisions

• Friday Reflection 48: Linguistics, Diagnosis, and Medical Error

• Friday Reflection 49: The Patients of 12 Reisman

• Friday Reflection 50: The Look

• Friday Reflection 51: Failing in Place

• Friday Reflection 52: The Three Worst Phone Calls of My Career

• Friday Reflection 53: Eradicating the Very Important Patient from the Medical Ecosystem

• Friday Reflection 54: The Extra-clinical Curbside

• Friday Reflection 55: The Wisdom of Colleagues

• Friday Reflection 56: Comments that Stuck

• Friday Reflection 57: Aging Is Not a Medical Problem

• Friday Reflection 58: COVID-19, Six Years On

• Friday Reflection 59: Healing Rather than Treating

• Friday Reflection 60: The Brockton

• Friday Reflection 61: Private Mini-Memorials