Valerie Brooke, MD
Responding to Suffering
Last year I started attending monthly lectures put on by the Nevada Physician Wellness Coalition (NPWC), an organization in line with my...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Apr 24
- 3 min
Restoration
It's been a long time since I've written, too long for sure, but a lot has happened in my personal and professional life in the last...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Jan 21
- 5 min
Getting COVID
DETECTED. SARS-CoV-2. There were the words on the lab results page I had seen so many times at the hospital where I worked. I never...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Dec 6, 2022
- 6 min
Things that Get in the Way
I recently picked up a dusty book from the overflowing self-help shelf on my bookcase: The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown. I’d had...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Oct 20, 2022
- 4 min
Words Matter
Quite frequently I will come across the word “non-compliant” in the medical record of a patient, one that I am going to admit to the...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Aug 15, 2022
- 5 min
Poor Insight
One of my favorite words in stroke recovery is anosognosia (a-no-sag-no-zhea). This is the bizarre symptom a patient often has after an...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- May 9, 2022
- 5 min
Love and Money
It took me many drives to work to realize what bothered me about this billboard. At first, I thought it was because I could not for the...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Mar 1, 2022
- 3 min
I Wish I'd Known
Yesterday I was invited to give a talk to a group of about fifty freshmen undergraduates at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). These...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Feb 20, 2022
- 4 min
Death and Dying
I was not aware during my medical training how fearful patients and medical professionals are about the one thing that we all will...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Feb 14, 2022
- 3 min
Imposter Syndrome
I will never forget the first medication I ordered as newly practicing physician. It was my first internal medicine rotation of...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Feb 7, 2022
- 4 min
The Stigma of Mental Health Illness in Medical Professionals
The other day one of my physician colleagues shared a story with me about some seemingly helpful advice he was given during the first...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Jan 31, 2022
- 3 min
Personal and Professional Perfectionism
To be perfect means to be “excellent or complete beyond practical or theoretical improvement.” Perfectionism is multi-dimensional and can...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Jan 23, 2022
- 4 min
Moral Injury
The term moral injury popped into the conversation about physician burnout back in 2018, when an article was published entitled...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Jan 16, 2022
- 3 min
Balancing the See Saw
On the way home from skiing last weekend my husband and I were humming along to the familiar 1968 Moody Blues song, “Ride…Ride my…blah...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Jan 9, 2022
- 4 min
The Owl and the Cheese
In 2001, Drs Friedman and Forster designed an experiment where two sets of college students were tasked to complete a computer maze,...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Jan 2, 2022
- 5 min
Doctors Don't Do Lunch
As part of my research on physician burnout, I have been reading books by other physicians who suggest multiple different strategies for...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Dec 26, 2021
- 3 min
A New Holiday Story
Yesterday at work, on Christmas Day, one of my patient’s care givers said to me, “Why are you here on Christmas? Did you get the short...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Dec 19, 2021
- 2 min
Professional Accomplishment
In addition to emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, not having a sense of personal accomplishment is the third symptom of burnout....
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Dec 12, 2021
- 3 min
Resilience
What type of person comes to mind when you think of the characteristic of resilience, the ability to continuously bounce back from...
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Valerie Brooke, MD
- Dec 5, 2021
- 3 min
Depersonalization
The meaning of depersonalization has always alluded me. How can one not feel like a person? I finally understood it when I experienced...
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