DGIM Generally Speaking

Opening Lines

Meet the new DGIM Faculty

The new academic year brings with it 32 talented, new DGIM Faculty Members!

Provenzano’s ‘Review of Systems’ Podcast Explores Landscape of Primary Care

During Fall 2016, Audrey Provenzano, MD, was looking for ways to stay sharp while she waited to complete her credentialing process and join the team at Chelsea HealthCare Center. As an avid podcast listener, it was only natural that Dr. Provenzano would look there to help fill the void. When Dr. Provenzano couldn’t find any podcasts focusing on the landscape of primary care, she took matters into her own hands, launching her own podcast: “Review of Systems.”

Culinary Literacy Corner: Smoothies—a Portal for Fruit and Fun

Smoothies are a fun way to get lots of fruit and vegetables into the daily diet and a great way to engage children. Berry smoothies are a staple in our household. Since I often leave the house before my children wake up, I prep the smoothie the night before; the fruit is cut up in the fridge (or portioned out in the freezer) and the blender and banana are out on the kitchen counter, ready to go. When my daughter wakes up, she mixes/blends in the fruit, ice and milk. And voila! Three servings of fruit to start her day.

Introducing the Informed Medical Decisions Program

The Informed Medical Decisions Program (IMDP) was established in April 2017 with a generous three-year grant from Healthwise, a nonprofit organization with a mission to help people make better health decisions. The IMDP is housed within the Health Decision Sciences Center (HDSC) in the Division of General Internal Medicine. The vision of the IMDP is to inform and amplify the patient’s voice in health care decisions and we plan to accomplish this through research projects focused on the IMDP’s core areas of investigation.

Bit of Balint

“Just as it is very difficult to operate with a blunt knife, to obtain sharp images with a faulty apparatus, to hear clearly through an unserviceable stethoscope, so the doctor will not be able to listen properly if he is in poor shape.” -Dr. Michael Balint. The Doctor, His Patient, and the Illness, 1954.

In this era of proliferating medical technology, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the clinician is still the fundamental instrument of healing. In primary care, it is the clinician who must make sense of the array of disorganized concerns and complaints our patients bring to us. Although we may sometimes feel like little more than sophisticated data entry devices, we know that to understand and address our patients’ problems we must be able to hear, to see¸ and to feel what is bothering them.

Spotlight on Education: Susan Seward—A Champion of Ambulatory Primary Care Medicine Education

Many of us in the DGIM enjoy teaching Harvard medical students in our ambulatory practices; but few of us have had the sustained longitudinal perspective of our own colleague Dr. Susan Seward, the Director of the Primary Care Clerkship (PCC) at MGH.

Pages: Notes from the DGIM Writer in Residence

It is much more important to know what sort of patient has a disease than what sort of disease a patient has,” advised Sir William Osler over a century ago. Though these words are as true as ever, it is increasingly difficult to learn from a person’s medical chart what “sort of patient” he or she is. While attending on the inpatient service, Alaka Ray, MD, a primary care physician in the IMA and Associate Program Director for Ambulatory Training in the Internal Medicine Residency program, wondered if the Social History, in which details of patients’ lives were once carefully recorded, needs more attention.

News and Notes

Ziperstein, Puig, and Chiappa win 2017 MGH PCE Faculty Teaching Award in Medicine; Levison receives a CFAR ADELANTE Award; Palamara’s Internal Medicine Professional Development Coaching Program featured in AAMC News