Marcus Maier | Pretty Good PA-C
5.6K posts

Marcus Maier | Pretty Good PA-C
@youngdudeman
Ortho Spine Physician Assistant | Husband+Dad | 1/2 🇵🇭| Views my own





Recently, I gave my cell number to a rheumatologist who’s located 3 hours away on behalf of a patient, so I could help the patient coordinate care closer to their home and be a resource locally. Not only did I get a “who are you and why did you even call me” kind of voicemail from the doctor’s office number (to call them back I had to go through 20 minutes of wait), but she made a referral for the patient to see another clinician (instead of me) also 3 hours away from the patient. This made me mad. It’s true that I’m just a country doctor. I’m not located in an academic center or a big city. But I’m where people need me to be. And I was trained in academic centers and tertiary hospitals. I just choose to be where I am because without the work we country doctors do, there would BE no tertiary referral centers. And goodness knows country doctors do so much work, our time is equally as valuable as any subspecialists. Let me be clear: snobby attitudes don’t serve patients. Our pathetic little pride and hierarchy show exactly how disconnected we are from our patients, without whom we don’t have a job. If we, as doctors, all think ourselves as colleagues of each other no matter where we are, what kind of resources we have, and what specialty we belong to, we do our patients a HUGE favor. On this team, we all work with and for the patient. Wherever they are, that’s where we should try to be, literally and figuratively. Let’s work together to make our patients’ lives easier. Please.

Giant Sturgeon fish in Canada


You will do better than most of your peers if you 1. Care 2. And are organized Intelligence only goes so far if you don’t have those.

The most common reasons adults choose to have shoulder surgery are the pain at night and the loss of sleep. Otherwise, for the most part, most will tolerate the daytime discomfort reasonably well.











