I was traveling the United States looking for a graduate level training job in neurosurgery. Women were not as accepted in medicine as they are now. Personally, I think it is at least in part because medicine was still considered a serious profession. Most of the places I interviewed had never hired a woman as a neurosurgery resident before. They would ask me behind closed doors (with no witnesses) if I planned to have a family or practice part time and thus compromise the investment in time and money they planned to make in me.
Oy!
I had met Mother Rocky, the great Jewish matriarch of a hunk of St. Louis, on a flight to that august city, where I had lucked out by getting a free upgrade to first class.
She seemed to think I would have some interest in an arranged marriage. Read more on The Part of Being Female I Still Wrestle With…
Filed under News by on Apr 3rd, 2014. Comment. 
I do not claim to be perfect but I DO claim to be a good doctor. Not just a good psychiatrist. Being a good doctor comes first.
One reason is that despite a lot of medical practice since graduation (I will admit to wincing a bit when I quote the figure in years–34) in multiple specialties, I still believe that taking care of other human beings and trying to help them through life is a sacred trust. I actually believe that doing what I do the best I can is more important to whatever religious future my soul can scrape up than showing up at public worship. Honest.
Another reason that I am a good doctor is that I am old enough that an amazing amount of bad medical things have happened to me. Often before I knew better, they were the side effects of prescription drugs. I now accept them only as temporary solutions. I would rather dive into the world of alternative natural substances — which do work — if the practitioner is someone who knows what they are doing which I do. Read more on Cholesterol Lowering and Drugs…
Filed under Alternative Medicine, medicine, News, prescription drugs, Research by on Apr 4th, 2014. Comment.
When I read the news on the internet that some folks were killed in some kind of what sounds like a Jewish oriented hate crime in the greater Kansas City area, I wasted no time. I immediately consulted my favorite British reporting. After all, US media has proven their biases and deficits in the reliability department, while the Daily Mail once again “done good” (as they say in Kansas).
I lived in Kansas for many years before I met and married my husband. I spent those years as a resident psychiatrist, as well as a member of the Conservative synagogue of Wichita, Kansas. I even taught a couple of classes at the Hebrew School.
I left before I met my husband, but it was for political reasons — the denial of ritual honors to women, and the threat of a major financier to pull funding if I took ritual honors a second time. Read more on When Are They Going To Stop Killing Jews?…
Filed under politics, Religion, Religion and Politics, Society by on Apr 14th, 2014. 1 Comment.
I was in my specialty training when I read Peter D.Kramer’s “Listening to Prozac.”
I remember thinking he was articulate and observant and all kinds of wonderful things, riding the cusp of a great change in psychiatry, doubting him to be a “real” scientist who would hang out at a meeting of the Society for Biological Psychiatry as I once did.
I was wondering what to do with the result of his observation that certain character traits, such as “rejection sensitivity,” could be somehow changed for the better with psycho-pharmacology. Read more on “Listening to Prozac” and What People Really Want…
Filed under Alternative Medicine, News, Sports by on Apr 17th, 2014. Comment.
Mostly everything that comes up and hits you in the teeth about the current controversy around “core standards” seems to be more political than born of actual knowledge.
This no surprise, really, since this is the reductionistic American mentality that makes it difficult to have meaningful conversations with the American Public without making them sound a lot like radio talk show rants.
With customary naiveté and sheer guts, I made the decision that I could not have an opinion about it without knowing what it actually was. Read more on Core Standards For Education – Political Grandstanding?…
Filed under Government, News, politics by on Apr 23rd, 2014. Comment.