Using Your Professional Life to Enact Your Values

When I worked at Borders in Downtown Crossing in Boston (remember Borders?!), I was once reprimanded for asking customers if they needed a bag for their purchase rather than giving them one automatically. I explained my reasoning to the manager (lots of people actually don’t— and never thought about it, and would be just as...

Does the language of health care matter?

Disclaimer: Dammit Jim, I’m a nurse, not a linguist!     We’ve been arguing over the language of the healing professions for a long time. Providers. Midlevels. Doctors. Physicians. Physician Extenders. Do the semantics matter to the development of the roles? To the patient experience? To the politics and payment?     In a 1951...

Rx: Vacation. Stat.

Did you take a vacation this summer? How about last year? Did you really go on vacation, or were you checking email on the beach (oops). Were you relaxing, or were you feeling guilty? (yup, that too). How did it get so hard to actually take a real vacation from work? Where is this coming from?...

Food for thought (or not).

In addition to being a blogger, a yogi, and a nurse practitioner, I’m a graduate student. (I’m doing doctoral work in nursing). I’m spending this week at the NIH in Bethesda at a research workshop/conference. Academic types do a lot of this type of thing: convene at a hotel or university (or government facility), listen...