ALiEM Book Club: The Tennis Partner
“Gripping… The Tennis Partner is a sincere and self-effacing book by a physician who well knows that there are things in the human heart that no electrocardiogram can detect.” – Times Literary Supplement
Abraham Verghese, a board-certified physician and a professor at Stanford University is a critically acclaimed, best-selling author. The Tennis Partner is an autobiographical memoir written by Verghese during a time of great turmoil in his life – an unraveling marriage while balancing a brand new attending position in El Paso, TX. He writes about his friendship with David Smith, a young Australian medical student that he meets. The book illuminates the intertwined worlds of of medicine and relationships, but above all else the capacity humans have towards each other in both a healing and hurtful manner.
Match season came to a close last month – and with that, some 17,000 U.S. medical school seniors earned a PGY-1 position. Most will go on to complete these programs and have happy, successful careers in their chosen specialty. But for a small number, second thoughts will creep in during residency. Maybe a life event changes the way a resident looks at his or her role in providing care; or perhaps exposure to another specialty – EM for example – occurred late in the fourth year of medical school. For these atypical applicants, there is a dearth of resources to help guide a re-match, if you will, and no guide for navigating the policies and politics associated with changing one’s mind.
Every year without exception, a new set of Chief Residents are chosen at each Emergency Medicine program. They are always excited for the position, but hardly prepared for what’s to come. We have now had 2 successful ALiEM Chief Resident Incubators and are extremely excited and thrilled to launch the third 
Point of care ultrasound (POCUS) is integral to the practice of emergency medicine (EM) and is a core competency for EM residents. Learning ultrasound requires development of a multi-faceted skill set including image acquisition, image interpretation, and integration into clinical decision making. Utilizing the principles of gamification and competition-based learning provides a more engaging method for teaching POCUS than traditional didactic formats.