Save the Date! Our next hike is EASY and great for the whole family! It’s my FAVORITE spot in San Diego–Torrey Pines State Reserve. It will be Sunday, April 11, 2021 at 9am. Stay tuned for more details. For questions, email Danielle Munce dmunce@health.ucsd.edu. We will meet and park (free) on Callan Road (see red circle on map below), near the Lodge at Torrey Pines. More details to follow!
Hello Everyone!
Happy Spring! We are so excited to announce that the UCSD IM Book Club is starting up again with the fabulous book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. This non-fiction book tells the incredible story of Henrietta Lacks whose cervical cancer cells were the first to be grown in culture and are still being propagated today. These cells, known as HeLa cells by scientists, have been essential to many medical advancements from the polio vaccine to gene mapping. During the author’s research, she became close with Henrietta Lacks’ remaining family members uncovering an extraordinary history of human experimentation and medical ethics. Check out this link for a full review: https://bloom-obgyn.com/book-review-the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks-by-rebecca-skloot/
UCSD’s book club strives to encourage reading and foster rewarding discussions in a very laid-back setting. We invite anyone and everyone (including family and friends) to join us whether you have time to read the whole book or even just the first page! This book has also been made into a feature film starring Oprah Winfrey, which is a great option to check out, if you aren’t able to pick up the book! The movie is available for streaming on HBO max.
Date & Time: Wednesday, May 19th at 6:30pm
Location: TBD (tentatively planning for an outdoor location at a pretty park)
Be on the lookout for an evite in your email! Email Lizzy Hastie ehastie@health.ucsd.edu for more details!
We cannot wait to hang out and chat about this beautiful book with you soon!
SAVE THE DATE! If you have the day off next Sunday, March 7, meet us at 9am at the trailhead at Lake Poway. 14644 Lake Poway Rd, Poway, CA 92064. $10 for parking (consider carpooling). 8 miles round trip; 2,000 feet of elevation gain, no shade, great views and photo op! Bring your mask and plenty of water! For more details, contact Christine Sonners (csonners@health.ucsd.edu).
Dr. Sladek and her family shared this with me, and I loved it so much, I wanted to share it with you. I felt it was particularly relevant during this challenging time!
“Gratitude turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger to a friend…it makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” -Melody Beattie
I want you to know how grateful I am for each of you–my UCSD IM family! You have been a source of inspiration to me throughout this difficult year. Thank you for what you do each year to care for our extended family, including our patients and one another. Here’s to a happy, healthy, peaceful 2021!!!
Love, simerjot
Amazing R1 (almost R2) Elizabeth Epstein has proven herself to be a champion of wellness. She has published a review paper reframing cardiac rehab as not only a means of increasing survival rates but also improving quality of life during those years! https://rdcu.be/b4KgR
That’s not all! She has also published an article giving us all a guide on how to maintain wellness in the COVID19 era. In the articles, she compares residency training to High Intensity Interval Training, and frames wellness as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Read more here: https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2020/05/covid-19-as-a-threat-to-wellness.html She did this all while being an amazing co-resident and physician!
| Vivek H. Murthy, MD, MBA, Congratulates Class of 2020 Dr. Vivek H. Murthy addresses the residency class of 2020 with a message that he has built his medical career around – that relationships and social connection effect all aspects of life. He shares the three aspects of building a connected personal and professional life: being fully present, always reach for kindness, and having the courage to be yourself. The video begins with introductions from AAIM President and CEO D. Craig Brater, MD, and ACP Chief Executive Officer and EVP Darilyn V. Moyer, MD. Total runtime: 19:04 minutes  Watch video from ACP website Vivek H. Murthy, MD, MBA, served as the 19th Surgeon General of the United States. As the Vice Admiral of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, he commanded a uniformed service of 6,600 public health officers globally. During his tenure, Dr. Murthy launched the TurnTheTide campaign, catalyzing a movement among health professionals to address the nation’s opioid crisis. An internal medicine physician and entrepreneur, Dr. Murthy has focused his attention on chronic stress and isolation as prevalent problems that have profound implications for health, productivity, and happiness. Dr. Murthy received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and his MD and MBA degrees from Yale University. He completed his internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and later joined Harvard Medical School as faculty in internal medicine. |
During the 2019-2020 academic year, our family of residents responded to three 6-word story prompts.
Grand rounds continued today with our guest speaker, Dr. Mark Berelowitz from Royal Free Hospital, London, who spoke to us about resilience and well-being, through the metaphor of the experience from the trapped Thai soccer team (Wild Boars) in 2018. We started with an overview of the rescue itself and a brief discussion of the attitudes of the boys from the soccer team about their experience within the cave.
Dr. Berelowitz then shifted to a discussion of resilience itself. He highlighted several concepts of resilience – inoculation theory, exercise theory, intrinsic toughness theory, family relationships theory, situational vs lifetime resilience – all of which he feels are insufficient to actually capture the meaning and mechanism of resilience. Instead, he again brought up the metaphor of the Thai soccer team to establish points necessary for resilience, including optimism and gratitude.
We then discussed the challenges of building resilience, both as individuals and as a society. He highlighted the need for us as a society – similar to the soccer team in the cave – to promote a value based culture. As stated by the political philosopher Michael Sandell, “[We] must find a way to lean against purely privatized notions of the good life, and instead cultivate civic virtue.” In addition, he discussed the importance of cultivating this notion both in a top-down (e.g. our hospital administrators) and bottom-up (e.g. our small clinical teams) approach. Dr. Berelowitz finally discussed the need to make such concepts habitual and highlighted the need for both societal and individual mindfulness in our approach to a value based culture.
