Doctor Goggles: Totally Different Than Beer Goggles

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Doctor goggling means diagnosing yourself with a new new terminal disease every week or so. It’s morbidity for the morbidly curious. It disproportionately affects those who know just enough to be dangerous.  While it’s considered to be more of a med student malady, for lucky shmoes like me, it can endure far beyond residency. Ordinarily I enjoy being under the …

Some People Have Real Problems

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Years ago, I bought an album because the title caught my eye: Some People Have Real Problems. I was browsing used CDs in a music store back when both of those existed, and I felt the universe trying to restore perspective to my personal pity party. Fast forward a decade, and I had fallen off the wagon again into whining …

The Power of Words

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The first year of medical school is spent acquiring the complex vocabulary of medicine. Reading books on finance and investing requires an analogous amount of deciphering intimidating terms that obfuscate useful concepts. One can make the case that intimate comprehension of a vocabulary distinguishes those who truly understand a branch of knowledge from those who don’t. Unfortunately, there is often …

Windfall Investing For Creeps And Jerks

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As an undergraduate majoring in Human Biology at Stanford, I was fortunate to study under the wonderfully entertaining anthropologist-biologist Bill Durham, who lectured us on competing theories of evolution. He first described the long-dominant idea of gradualism, where minor adaptations accrue subtly over millennia to create slow, constant and consistent evolutionary changes over time. This idea was contested by supporters …

Finding Your Tribe: The Society For The Preservation of White Tube Socks

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Today we’ll take a break from finance to discuss a tangent of equal life import: finding your tribe.Picture if you will a Californian transplanted to Cambridge, Massachusetts in the autumn of 2003. The only L.L. he’s ever heard of is Cool J, not Bean.  He sports flannel instead of tweed, and is completely disoriented by the local Emergency Department attire …

Fighting Fire with FIRE

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This weekend I went back country camping with a close friend in Northern California, witnessing the residual smoky haze of the fires firsthand as we snaked along Interstate 80 in poor visibility en route to the Western Sierras. My thoughts at the time were with EJ at Dads, Dollars and Debts, who lives in the area. A week earlier, I …

We Are The Champions!?

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It’s official: a study published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings showed that as of 2014, Emergency Medicine (EM) took the top slot for physician burnout (59%).  Suck it, critical care (50%). In your face, OB/GYN (56%).  We’re #1, we’re # …huh? How did my beloved field of EM win the race to nowhere?  When I was in medical school, the …

Why Japanese Workers (and Medical Residents) Should Pursue FIRE

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In the years following WWII, the U.S. helped Japan rebuild infrastructure and institutions. From that time onward, the relationship has been mostly a bromance. Our nations have arguably become the Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson of the G-8, putting one another in playful headlocks when negotiating Pacific trade agreements or playing wingman when a cute vulnerable bachelorette country finds itself …