Author's posts
Masks are an effigy of American technocratic incompetence
Seven weeks before President Trump declared COVID-19 a federal emergency heralding the economic lockdown, Jesse’s customers began cutting their orders. Jesse sells garments and cotton, imported predominantly from India, to wholesalers and retaile…
False negative: COVID-19 testing’s catch-22
In a physician WhatsApp group, a doctor posted he had a fever of 101 degrees Fahrenheit and muscle ache, gently confessing that it felt like his typical “man flu” which heals with rest and scotch. He worried that he had coronavirus. When the reverse tr…
Why the Lancet’s editorial on Kashmir is unhelpful
If Rudolph Virchow’s observation that “medicine is a social science and politics is nothing but medicine writ large” is true, then medicine is bias writ large because politics is nothing but bias on steroids. Virchow’s maxim is now adopted by medical j…
Becoming a doctor in India can be life-threatening
Recently, my niece gingerly confided that she was going to study engineering rather than medicine. I was certain she’d become a doctor – so deep was her love for biology and her deference to our family tradition. But she calculated, as would anyone wit…
Keeping the art of medical satire alive
Sequels generally disappoint. Jason couldn’t match the fear he generated in the original Friday the 13th. The sequel to the “Parachute,” a satirical piece canvassing PubMed for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing parachutes to placebo, matche…
