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Our past is prologue: We are losing the battle to train more Black doctors
My mother was a child of the 1960s. Despite not having a college degree, she was determined to teach my sister and me that women could do anything. I guess my sister was really the intended target, but I was…
Silence is golden—but does self-imposed silence lead to burnout?
Burnout is associated with silence in various contexts. It is called the silent crisis, the silent epidemic, or the silent killer. What is not talked about is the pressure or fear at work, whether professional or personal, that can lead…
Conveying vascular surgery’s essential ‘coolness’
Let’s start with a question: how do we communicate coolness? No, I am not referring to a cool or cold foot in the emergency room in need of assessment for acute limb ischemia. We have validated clinical scales to communicate…
Our forever plague
The following is a combined and revised version of the November and December 2021 editorials on fake news and science denial published in Vascular Specialist. Supplemental information and resources have been added to assist physicians in combating science denial and…
Our broken system: Medical liability in vascular practice
My last editorial, “How to succeed in vascular surgery: A guide for the aspiring outlier,” was more controversial than I expected. I naively believed that a critical expose of vascular surgery’s “1%” would be welcomed by roughly 99% of vascular…
It is time to end the interview
INTERVIEWER: “Good morning, nice to meet you. Are you going to get pregnant?” While this may seem like a shocking way to begin a conversation, some version of this dialog occurs in many surgical residency interviews. According to research presented…
The choice between autonomy, true partnership—or the slow drift to ‘thralldom‘
Anthony Valdés, MBA, the president of Tampa, Florida-based Collaborative Health Systems, declares that what physicians want is to “deliver great clinical outcomes, get paid fairly for that care, and stay independent.” It is becoming clearer with every passing year that,…
Overcoming prejudice and uniting vascular surgery
The United States has been living through some charged times recently. Our profession is not immune to these conflagrations. In recent times, minority members of the diverse specialty of vascular surgery have seen people who look like them come under…
An open letter to Epic Systems
Dear Epic, I am not writing to you today as a customer, but rather on behalf of your users. More specifically, I am representative of the 870 American Medical Association (AMA) physicians who gave their electronic health record (EHR) an…
When there are none: Why manels are out
On June 12, 2019, the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, MD, made a public commitment to decline to take part in panels that “do not fairly evaluate scientists of all backgrounds for speaking opportunities.”1 Collins referred…