Category: Conditions

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…

Why telehealth will change the course of autism

As a medical student working in East Harlem, I see inequities in access to care on a daily basis. These inequities are exemplified amongst children suffering from neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism. In 2000, about 1 in 150 children were ident…

The importance of treating early treatment diseases

Today, the practice of medicine mainly involves treating medical conditions after symptoms of the medical condition become obvious (e.g., setting a fracture or treating pneumonia), or preventing disease for a population of patients using a preventative…

What can we learn from Cheslie Kryst?

“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.” – Fred Rogers Cheslie Kryst, a former Miss USA, lawyer, and entertainment correspondent, died by suicide. She was smart, beautiful,…

Changing the game plan: COVID’s second half

Recently, I was on several calls concerning the precipitous rise of COVID-19 cases and the burden to the health care system. There’s no doubt that we are at a point where challenges become crisis, and crisis becomes collapse. The constant influx …

What shared journeys to the afterlife teach about dying well and living better

An excerpt from At Heaven’s Door: What Shared Journeys to the Afterlife Teach About Dying Well and Living Better. What brings you here? I ask this question of every person who steps through the door because they have come to talk about death—the …

Why do we obsess and repeat?

An excerpt from Heart Medicine: How to Stop Painful Patterns and Find Peace and Freedom–at Last. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. For many months, Leila could not stop ruminating about the fateful event of s…

Here’s what it takes to do good science under pressure

How can you know that science done quickly during a crisis is good science? This question has taken on new relevance with the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Researchers developed vaccines in under a year — easily breaking the previous record of four years. …

Autism spectrum disorder and the masks we wear 

In the ongoing saga of the pandemic, there is the debate whether to wear a mask or not. These are physical masks that temporarily hide our face, but we all wear another type of mask, a metaphorical mask. These are the masks we put on to present who we …