We All Read The House of God

Before medical school—casually, almost universally—my generation read The House of God.

It was never a required text. It couldn’t be. Assigning it formally would have felt overly pessimistic, maybe even unprofessional. But we all read it anyway. Quietly. Knowing—on some level—that this was the world we were about to enter.

Back then, the book felt like dark satire. Cynicism exaggerated for effect. A rite of passage whispered about among premeds and medical students. We laughed at the jokes about orthopedic height versus neurosurgery height. We knew the term “GOMER,” even if we also knew better than to use it out loud. The humor was uncomfortable but familiar, and it gave us a strange kind of psychological armor.

That era is over.

We are now so far on the opposite end of that spectrum that the jokes don’t even land anymore. What we see every day isn’t gallows humor—it’s sheer lunacy. Idiocracy. Systems so contorted that doing the right thing for a patient often requires active resistance.

This blog exists because what we experience now would sound unbelievable if you weren’t living it.

In the posts that follow, you’ll hear stories that feel like they belong in a television comedy—except not the kind of comedy medicine once had. Not Scrubs, where the humor came from humility, self-deprecation, and imposter syndrome. Not antics rooted in junior doctors learning, failing, and growing.

This is a different genre entirely.

This is about physicians advocating—relentlessly—for patients while battling forces that have nothing to do with medicine itself. Sometimes we’re battling other physicians. Sometimes we’re battling a radiology tech who refuses to come take an X-ray because they’re on break. Sometimes we’re battling a laboratory that mishandles or misruns a specimen. Sometimes we’re battling electronic health records that demand mountains of clinically irrelevant documentation while actively obstructing patient care.

And we do this every single day.

This isn’t about nostalgia for a harsher training era, and it’s not about romanticizing burnout. It’s about naming the reality of modern medicine honestly. About pulling back the curtain on systems that force clinicians into absurd, adversarial roles when all we are trying to do is take care of the person in front of us.

If these stories sound unreal, that’s the point.

They shouldn’t be real.

But they are.