The KF Blog

It was the first day of my clerkship—the 3rd year of medical school when you rotate through different hospital placements—and my first rotation was in pediatrics. I showed up bright and early, wearing my brand new white lab coat, the pockets stuffed with handbooks, cheat sheets, and a variety of medical instruments, trying to look […]

Have you ever been listening to the radio and the promo jingle for the station comes on, claiming their music selection can “make your workday go faster”? It’s the kind of thing that makes me feel incredibly sad whenever I hear it. Over our lifetimes, we spend a huge proportion of our waking hours at […]

Angela was desperate to lose weight. Over the past six months she’d noticed her weight going up but couldn’t figure out why. As far as Angela could tell, she was eating the same things she always had. Her activity level hadn’t changed. So she came to see me, her family doctor, asking to get her […]

The charts stretched along the counter in a seemingly endless line. It was the queue of patients who had checked in and were waiting to be seen at the walk-in clinic where I was working that day, and there were more continuing to flow through the door. I was the solo doctor on duty. The […]

My family thinks I’m obsessed. And maybe I am, but it comes from something I experience on a daily basis at work. Young women often come to see me with a particular constellation of symptoms: poor concentration, fatigue, hair loss, plus generally low mood and irritability. So I send them for investigations, and what comes […]

If you’re a health coach or any other self-employed wellness professional, you’ve probably heard this advice before: you need to have a niche. But sometimes this is easier said than done. A lot of coaches worry that choosing a specific niche means they won’t be able to serve enough people. That they’ll be alienating most […]

When I was a new mom—sleep-deprived and struggling under the overwhelm of first-time motherhood—I would go on a daily walk, pushing my stroller to the closest Starbucks. After a short, numb stroll that I barely remembered I would shuffle up to the counter and order a venti macchiato with caramel drizzle and lots of foam. […]

When I was sixteen, I was obsessed with nutrition. It was the 80s, and nutrition at that time was all about the evils of cholesterol. I recall stirring a pot of oatmeal (made from real oats!) for the boys I was babysitting, preaching to them about the dangers of cholesterol and what it did to […]

When I was a medical student, I loved surgery. The operating room experience is like nothing else, and there’s something deeply satisfying about solving a problem so definitively. Tumor? You cut it out. Infection? You drain it. Voila. Problem solved. Also, there’s the ritual of the OR: the washing of hands, the donning of sterile […]