Category: interpersonal relations
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Preventing Physician Burnout
I recently came across this interesting article about physician burnout. It was a nice review of the relevant literature. The authors addressed the obvious issues such as job dissatisfaction, turnover and related financial and career-related issues. They also did a really good job describing the correlation between physician burnout and medical errors (and malpractice claims),…
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When Patients Try to Seduce Doctors
I was recently interviewed for a Medscape article about maintaining professional boundaries, entitled, When Patients Try to Seduce Doctors. It’s a relatively short piece and, though I was misquoted a little, it has some good information about the doctor-patient relationship and the importance of establishing and upholding appropriate professional boundaries. Check it out.
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Exercise to Argue Better
Let’s face it, all couples argue (well, some don’t but they probably don’t communicate much). Typically when we argue we we try to convince the other person that we are right and they are wrong. In doing so we tend not to listen much; instead while the other person is speaking we are thinking up…
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Does more sex mean more happiness?
A really interesting paper just came out today that looked at, and challenged, the widely held belief that the more frequently you have sex the happier you are… and they discovered that this was simply not true. What the researchers did find was that most healthy couples had sex about once per week and that…
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Disruptive behavior linked with safety problems
The Washington Post ran an article about a Tel Aviv University study of the effects of physicians’ disruptive behavior on patient safety. As discussed in previous posts, there is a clear link between disruptive behavior among physicians (and other professionals) and negative patient outcomes. The coworkers who are often the target of or witness to…
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Older women still enjoy active sex lives
A recently published article in the Annals of Family Medicine, yielded data that busted inaccurate stereotypes and myths about sexuality and aging in women. Nearly six out of ten women over the age of 60 reported being sexually active. The study interviewed more than 2,100 U.S. women ranging in age from 28 to 84, most…
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Forgiveness
Over the years of doing psychotherapy with individuals and couples I have often observed a thematic trend from patient to patient. Sometimes I get a bunch of calls about relationship problems or several existing patients will bring up similar issues in the same week or even the same day. Lately I have noticed that I…
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Does empathy matter?
As a psychologist, this is no surprise to me, but medical schools and physicians’ residency training programs are concluding that empathy (understanding the patient’s perspective and effectively communicating that understanding to him or her), in fact, matters quite a bit. Programs Aimed At Equipping Doctors With Empathy See Yielding Results. In a nearly 1,650-word piece,…
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Is chronic pain “all in your head?”
The one thing that frustrates a sufferer of chronic pain more than the pain she experiences is hearing that the pain is “all in [her] head.” A new study, recently published in the Journal of Pain and reported upon in the LA Times, noted that there really are clear and demonstrable differences in the brains of…