Interested in the television show ER or real
emergency rooms? Intrigued by unusual emergency room stories? Want
to know what it's really like to be an ER doctor? Are you thinking of
becoming an emergency doctor or nurse? Ever wonder what goes on in
hospital emergency rooms that is never mentioned on the show ER? Do
you enjoy reading books of ER stories? Do you have a question that you'd
like to ask an ER doctor? Do you want some advice for getting into medical
school or tips for the MCAT exam? Even if you don't think you're smart
enough to become a doctor, I can show you how to transform your brain into the
mind of a genius. So if you're interested in ER topics or medicine in
general, you'll spend many enjoyable and informative hours reading the numerous pages on my web site.
Greetings! I'm Kevin Pezzi, MD, an ER physician and author
of
TRUE Emergency Room
Stories,
Fascinating Health Secrets,
The Science of Sex (who says
that ER doctors cannot specialize in other fields, too?), and
How to Lose Weight without Dieting, Drugs,
Herbs, Exercise, or Surgery (it's possible, trust me . . . I
graduated in the top 1% of my class in medical school, and I know what I'm
talking about).
In this site I'll present some excerpts and reviews of ER
books, answer questions that I'm often asked during my radio interviews, and
present a wide-ranging
ER question & answer (Q&A) forum along with a
variety of other ER topics. (I have another ER Q&A forum on
www.ER-doctor.com.) I am willing to answer questions pertaining to
emergency medicine, medicine in general, sex, brainpower, and scholastic
achievement, but before you
contact me, please check my
numerous Q&A pages to see if I've already covered that topic (I probably have!).
If you're interested in medicine in general and ER in particular, you might
want to read my book reviews even if reviews aren't normally your cup of tea,
because in some of my many tangents I address a few of the thorniest issues in
medicine today. I also tell some stories I didn't include in my first ER
book, and in a humorous (I think) graphic I poke fun at an uppity Harvard grad
who knows less than what she thinks she does.
If you are one of
the many students who come to this site seeking career advice, you may wonder
about my qualifications for giving it. I covered this topic in the
following excerpt from the introduction to my book:
So You Want to be an ER Doctor?
The Pros and Cons of a Career in Emergency Medicine
Tips on Achieving Your Goal
While any ER doctor could plausibly write a book such as this one, I believe
that I am more qualified for two reasons. First, I had to overcome a
number of obstacles to achieve success. Many medical students come
from professional, stable families in which the children are showered with a
number of material advantages. You may not be so fortunate, but this
need not hamper you. Even if you are poor, as I was, I can show you
how to outperform your peers who attended the best private schools, were
well connected, and could afford every conceivable boost such as prep
courses for the SAT exam. Second, I wasn’t born bright. In sixth
grade, my teacher chided me for being “slow,” and I received D’s in my
sophomore year of high school. It’s not an understatement to say that
I was considerably behind the curve for people with aspirations of a medical
career. In spite of that inauspicious beginning, I obtained virtually
perfect grades my last two years of high school and throughout college, and
I aced the MCAT exam. My medical school accepted one person per year
(for a class of 256 students) with just three years of college if their
grades and MCAT scores were exemplary, and I
was that person. Like many medical school applicants, I felt some
anticipatory anxiety over the admissions interview, which is fabled to be
stressful. Instead of grilling me with tough questions, my interviewer
examined my record, then looked at me and said, “We’re obviously going to
accept you.” I graduated in the top 1% of my class in medical school,
and was such a shoo-in for an ER residency position (the most coveted
residency at that time) that I was offered an under-the-table deal because
they wanted to ensure that no other hospital lured me away. The
director of my residency program once commented that I was the smartest
resident they ever had, and one of my former bosses told me that I was the
smartest doctor he ever met. Aren't these implausible accolades for someone who was once a
class dunce? Hence, I think that I am uniquely qualified to write a “how to
succeed” book, because I know how to do it, and I was not born with that
aptitude. I learned how to expand my brainpower, and I can show you how to do
the same thing. You can learn more from me than you can from people who were
born on third base, and act as if they just hit a triple. Whether they are
born geniuses telling you how to become more intelligent, or people with
naturally beautiful bodies lecturing you on how to be more attractive, I
question the utility of their advice.
Besides giving you tips on
ways to augment your intelligence and memory, I will tell you a secret that
will give you an edge over other medical school applicants. A minority of
them have stellar grades and MCAT scores. The record of most successful
applicants is very good, but not superb. How can you convince the Admissions
Committee that they should pick you, instead of another qualified applicant?
Given the limited number of available positions, Admissions Committees cannot
accept everyone who is smart enough to become a doctor. Most applicants seek
to enhance their desirability by doing things that really don’t give them an
edge, such as volunteering. Amongst medical school applicants, this is almost
as common as breathing, so it is futile to think that this will make you stand
out from the crowd. Unless you are content with entrusting your future to
fate, or subsequently reapplying if you are rejected, you need something that
gives you a distinct advantage. I will tell you how to do something that will
leave an indelibly positive impression on the Admissions Committee, and all
but ensure that you will be accepted.
In this book, I will also
discuss the pros and cons of a career in emergency medicine (and, to a lesser
extent, to any medical career). Unlike some authors who gloss over the
drawbacks of a career so they can write a more rah-rah book and achieve more
sales, I will emphasize the negative aspects to balance the overly positive
impression you probably possess from various media exposures. There are
several factors that conspire to make emergency medicine a noxious career, but
I will reveal how you can minimize some of these headaches.
You will be pleasantly
surprised if you’re expecting a dry, pedantic book. You will find many
intriguing, provocative, and offbeat discussions that will increase your
knowledge of what it’s really like to be an ER doctor. I will also talk about
how an ER career affects your personal life. Believe me, it will.
Unlike some authors who hide behind their
publishers and don’t make themselves available to their readers, I am very
accessible. You can contact me by using this hyperlink:
www.MySpamSponge.com/send.php?handle=erdoc (see *
below). If you have a question that I did not address in this
book, I will gladly answer it for you and include it in a subsequent book so
that others can benefit from the information.
________________________
*
MySpamSponge is a site I
developed that anyone can use to block all of their spam, but never any
legitimate messages. With MySpamSponge, you communicate using
handles instead of e-mail addresses. A handle is essentially a contact
code that gives people a way to contact you via e-mail without you
having to reveal your e-mail address. Similarly, you can send a message
by using the recipient’s handle as the address (mine is ERdoc). Smart people
will quickly "get it" and realize that this could be the magic bullet that
makes spam a thing of the past, but I wonder if the average Internet user
can grasp a major innovation that didn't come from Microsoft or Google.
We'll see.
By the way, since MySpamSponge is new, you can
have almost any handle you want. First come, first served, so the bright
"early adopters" will get the best handles.
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ER
Question of the Week
(for hundreds more,
click here)
Q:
The
emergency doctor profession seems very glamorous. Is it? Regards,
Emma
A:
It may seem glamorous to be an ER doctor, especially now that
ABC-TV's The Bachelor currently features an ER doc who is
young, handsome, taller than Jack and the Beanstalk, and surrounded
by 25 beautiful women who tell him how amazing he is every minute or
two. However, emergency room physicians have a notable absence of
glamour in their professional careers. In fact, much of what they
do, and must put up with, is the antithesis of glamour. It can be
downright disgusting, such as when an ER doctor is disimpacting a
patient (using his fingers to dig a hard ball of stool from the
rectum of a plugged-up patient who is usually elderly, comatose, or
paralyzed). The smell can be so noxious that you might vomit, no
matter how hard you try to suppress it (it's happened to me). It is
also not very glamorous to touch the bodies of people who have not
bathed in months, if ever. Then there is the sheer unpleasantness of
dealing with "mean-drunk" alcoholics, drug addicts, and myriad other
patients with assorted abrasive personalities. I don't know how old
you are, but I would wager that if you spend a day in an ER, you
will see people who are unlike anyone you've ever seen before (to
get an idea of what you will face, watch the movie Deliverance). You
will witness behavior so outlandish that you may wonder if you are
on another planet. In a sense, you are. You're in the ER. The doors
that separate emergency rooms from the outside world may as well be
doors into another universe. When people think of the ER, they think
of blood and guts. They should also think of feces, urine, vomit,
pus from disgusting places, unmentionable pelvic discharges, temper
tantrums, endless profanity, threats, assorted verbal abuse, and the
occasional punch now and then.
So is it glamorous to work in the ER?
In a word, no. However, the startling absence of glamour in the ER
is offset by other factors, such as the unparalleled satisfaction
that you can feel after saving someone's life. Consider what people
in other occupations may do during the course of a day. A waitress
may serve dozens of customers. A Wal-Mart cashier may sell a hundred
made-in-China items of junk that cost half of what comparable
American-made merchandise might sell for, but break down after a few
uses. (After replacing three made-in-China mixers in the past three
months, I've had it with their junk!) An office worker may process
many forms, moving them from Pile A to Pile B. In contrast, an ER
doctor might save a dozen or more lives, and indelibly affect many
more both directly and indirectly. Furthermore, as an ER physician,
you have the opportunity to achieve results that are commensurate
with your level of skill, knowledge, and intelligence. If you are
exceptionally smart, knowledgeable, thorough, and diligent, you will
save lives and positively affect others in cases that a lesser ER
doctor would have botched. Yes, it is rewarding to save any life,
but after a while the luster of that is dulled by the realization
that most of your "saves" could have had an identical outcome if
they were treated by any ER doc. However, if you are good at what
you do, you could save the lives of people who would have gone to
their graves had an average ER doctor treated them. Now that's
rewarding.
In my opinion, glamour is not a good
criterion to be used in the selection of a career. In reality, few
jobs are as glamorous as they may seem. Take fashion models, for
example. Their job may seem glamorous, but that is only when they
are strutting down the runway with their "no real person walks this
way" stride and the flashbulbs are popping. Their careers would seem
less glamorous if you saw them sweating during their 3-hour per day
workouts or enduring the agony of self-imposed semi-starvation
(unless they'd read my book
How to Lose Weight Without
Dieting, Drugs, Herbs, Exercise, or Surgery, in which
case they could discover how to have a great body without torturing
themselves).
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