Pulmonary Consult

My very last rotation of medical school is pulmonary consult at Moffitt-Long hospital. Oddly enough, it is the first time I've donned on the white coat and picked up my stethoscope in months. And although the hours are much busier than research and radiology, it is wonderful to be back in the hospital. I think now that intern year is looming, I am focusing on shoring up my inefficiencies during clinical care. Pulmonology will be useful for both medicine and anesthesia, and I'm starting to get back into the routine of ward medicine. My team is fantastic and there is a focus on daily education. In general, we get consulted on patients with the bread-and-butter exacerbations of asthma to patients with obscure diseases like Langerhans cell histiocytosis. I really enjoy the focus on lifestyle interventions; we spend a lot of time talking to patients about their smoking and drug habits. Even more than that, a lot of conferences have been about the benefits of exercise and weight loss on cardiopulmonary diseases. Pulmonologists are true internal medicine doctors focusing on the whole patient, their social situation, their lifestyle, but they also have such expertise in critical care, bronchoscopy, and rare disease entities.

Image is in the public domain, from Gray's Anatomy, from Wikipedia.