Announcing @ResidentMurmurs!

For the three people (and my Mom) who actually read these posts, I want to go ahead and announce that I will be officially retiring The Language of Medicine after its five year anniversary at the end of December. Five years is a nice round number, and it is time to move on to bigger and better things.

Instead, I will begin contributing to Resident Murmurs (www.residentmurmurs.org), an online forum that is halfway between personal blog and academic journal. This is a joint venture comprised of three of my closest friends and me, all of us soon-to-be physicians. As we write in our mission statement, "We are four physicians committed to the core principles of integrity, compassion, empathy, humility, respect, and delivery of holistic care. Resident Murmurs is a forum in which we explore and promote humanism in medicine through thoughtful reflection, based on patient and provider experiences with health, illness, life, and death." Through narrative, we seek to acknowledge and advance the powerful role of human experience in healing.

You can sign up for our mailing list on our website, and don't forget to follow us on Twitter (@ResidentMurmurs). The full site will launch in mid-February, with content beginning on March 21, 2014 (aka "Match Day").

Seed money was provided by the Center for Public Leadership (CPL) at the Harvard Kennedy School. You can find our first press release here on their website.

My peeps... I met Sophia McKinley and Eric Seymour last year, as they were both Zuckerman Fellows at CPL. Dinushika Mohottige you actually already know (she is one of my closest friends and I profiled her here on this blog years ago!). Sophia, Eric, and I are all applying now to residency, while Dinushika is an Internal Medicine intern at Duke. Future Dr. McKinley and I are applying in General Surgery; Eric will be a Pediatrician. The four of us have very different backgrounds and writing styles, which will make the next few years the absolute funnest.

The four of us will initially start with weekly content, slowly building our web and social media presence. We eventually hope to partner with other organizations and institutions as we move #humanisminmedicine forward. To help do this, we will start accepting submissions from patients and providers alike within the first year. We hope to hear from all of you! More on that to come.

On that note, "we invite you to join us in building this special space where medicine, writing, and humanism can intertwine to provide reflective pause, combat the corroding effects of training, and promote more caring in medicine."

www.residentmurmurs.org