Category: Conditions

Farmer Jesty’s bold experiment

An excerpt from First Patients: The incredible true stories of pioneer patients. Unfazed by the village doctors’ refusals, the parish deacon forged ahead. Dr. Andrew Bell–preacher, educator, and doctor, possessed the temper and energy of a combustion e…

Why is the world’s first universal coronavirus vaccine not in the FDA’s toolbox?

Success in any project is based on using the right tool for the job. No tool would be more effective in the campaign against COVID than Covaxin, which has shown its value in India and other markets during recent months.  While mRNA vaccines were a prom…

An update on COVID’s long tail

What’s the problem? Anthony Fauci, MD, has said: “Virtually everybody is going to wind up getting exposed and likely get infected.” There’s one reason to avoid this scenario: long COVID. If Omicron is sooner or later going to in…

Don’t be in a hurry to fast

There is a lot of confusion and outright falsehoods about fasting. You can search the internet for clarity and end up more confused than when you started. The fact is, fasting can be a very effective tool to improve your metabolic health, increase insu…

Art as a tool to manage pain

My niece and I look across the expanse of the second floor of Marshall’s Dranko Library as we take in the library’s Spring art exhibit: Creation in Confinement. We spot my moon drawings on black paper hanging on the opposite wall. As a new artist, acco…

COVID is not always mild in kids

Can we agree to abandon the notion that COVID in children is “mild?” At least, as a medical community? We are taught to look at the data and guide our patients based on evidence. And the fact is, in a single week in January 2022, nearly 1 million pedia…

Support desperate health care workers now, before your life counts on them

I come calling from the frontlines of COVID. My colleagues and I are exhausted. Defeated. And on the brink of collapse. I have been a health care worker for 15 years. I have never seen things so bad in so many ways. At the height of COVID, I was workin…

What really happens when the unvaccinated get sick with COVID

“My body, my rights.” “My body is a temple.” “I don’t want poison going into my body.” ” I’ve done my research.” And they refuse to wear masks; they refuse to social distance. They refuse COVI…

Inside the race to conquer the COVID-19 pandemic

An excerpt from The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic. Copyright © 2022 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. For the first time in weeks, Uğur Şahin’s calendar was clear. It was a Friday mo…

Patients need palliative care to manage the pain of sickle cell disease

Sickle cell disease (SCD) affects about 100,000 Americans as an inherited genetic disorder with intermittent exacerbations requiring hospitalization. SCD is also a painful and complicated disease with no single physician specialist that can provide pai…