The first time I saw a patient in the hospital was in 2004, twenty years ago, when I was a third-year med student.
Since that time, I have spent countless hours in the hospital as a resident, a renal fellow, and finally as an attending. And I’m sure many of you in the medical community feel the same thing I do — which is that patients are much more complicated now than they used to be. I’ll listen to an intern present a new case on rounds and she’ll have an assessment and plan that encompasses a dozen individual medical problems. Sometimes, I have to literally be like — wait, why is this patient here again?