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Healthy Foods Close to Home: The Fresh Truck Model
As obesity rates continue to rise in the United States, researchers have pointed toward numerous causes: ultra-processed foods, lack of physical... -
What Your Patients are Hearing About GLP-1 Medications
Glugacon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist medications have taken social media and celebrity news by storm. Your patients have likely heard... -
The New Landscape of Obesity Medicine: What Does This Mean for Patients?
With the development and expanded use of medications for the treatment of obesity, we are able to broaden the tools we can offer patients to treat...
Archive
Perspectives in Primary Care features writing from practitioners, activists, and community members representing organizations, practices, and institutions across the United States and around the world.
Achievement in Family Medicine Student Spotlight: Ashley Shaw
Name: Ashley Shaw HMS graduation year: 2019 Residency: Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA What are you most proud of? I am most proud of contributing to the nurturing of a more robust and interdisciplinary community of students armed with the skills to become leaders in the primary care of tomorrow. I feel so grateful to have benefitted personally and professionally from that community as well. How were you involved in primary care at ...
Family Medicine Alumni Spotlight: Anne Marie Williams
The Harvard Home for Family Medicine builds upon the growing community of HMS family medicine students, residents, and attendings engaged in family medicine education, research, and mentorship opportunities. While most of our more active participants are based within the Harvard system, our Harvard Medical School students often graduate to residencies further afield. In this series, we’re thrilled to spotlight what some of our recent HMS Family Medicine students have gone on to achieve. Name:
Achievement in Family Medicine: Student Spotlight
Name: Megan Townsend HMS graduation year: 2019 Residency: University of Colorado, Denver, CO What are you most proud of? There is a strong history of passionate and dedicated students working to advance primary care at Harvard Medical School (HMS), and it was my pleasure at HMS to add to this tradition. The Center itself was created as a response to student demand for more support for primary care students, and I am proud that I helped contribute to building and ...
Treating Pain During an Opioid Epidemic in the Primary Care Setting
By: Mahmud Ibrahim, MD and Linda Girgis, MD According to the CDC, there are an estimated 50 million adults (or 20.4% of the population) in the US suffering from chronic pain. Additionally, there are 19.6 million adults with high-impact chronic pain. Chronic pain is defined as pain that typically lasts for longer than 12 weeks. While pain may serve as a warning of possible injury, chronic pain can last for months to years. Many chronic pain patients seek ...
HMS Family Medicine Alumni Spotlight
The Harvard Home for Family Medicine builds upon the growing community of HMS family medicine students, residents, and attendings engaged in family medicine education, research, and mentorship opportunities. While most of our more active participants are based within the Harvard system, our Harvard Medical School students often graduate to residencies further afield. In this series, we’re thrilled to spotlight what some of our recent HMS Family Medicine students have gone on to achieve. Name:
Pursuing Primary Care at Harvard Medical School
What influences Harvard Medical School (HMS) students to pursue a career in primary care? In our study, we surveyed HMS graduates from 1980 to 2016 who matched into internal medicine, family medicine, and pediatrics residencies to dig deep into this question. We learned that three out of four students who started HMS with an interest in primary care stuck with their goal. Over the 37 years, the ...
Where does the individual physician fit in the new medicine?
By Steven A. Barrett, MD, FAAFP I am realizing that practice management in the new medicine is derived more from “group-think” than individual initiative. While this might work well for large medical organizations, where does it leave the imaginative individual physician trying to create improved medical care delivery systems? Of course, I am speaking from personal experience and raising this issue as a challenge to our medical system to be more open and inclusive and take advantage of all available bright ideas for improvement. ...
Trust - Abundant Team Principles
Effective models of trust: How can you incorporate the all-important ingredient of trust within your healthcare team? Once upon a time, it was possible for a doctor to hold most of what she needed to know to practice medicine within her own brain. This was long before Google and before medicine was carved up into specialties and sub-specialties. The advances brought on by the information age and technology mean that no individual can know all there is to ...
The Art of the Referral
By Linda Girgis, MD In our current practice of medicine, many people don’t understand what a primary care physician (PCP) does. Some are disillusioned that the PCP serves as a glorified receptionist, just sitting in their offices to pass out referrals to specialists, the real doctors. Often, patients call my office for a referral to a specialist based on a problem that we never treated them for. Many people don’t understand why the receptionist cannot just give them a referral. A referral involves medical decision making and is part of ...