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.

I have written a series of reflections on medicine for the site.

• 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