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 …
Category: Conditions
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 …
A neurologist grapples with aducanumab
I have been following the controversy surrounding the approval of the new Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab with great interest. Until a year and a half ago, I worked as a neurologist in an adult general neurology clinic. Many of my patients had dem…
The pandemic drives a decline in teen substance abuse
The percentage of teens using illicit substances dropped significantly in 2021 as the pandemic forced them into isolation from friends, classrooms, and extracurricular activities. Alcohol, marijuana, and nicotine vaping – the most commonly used substan…
5 science-backed strategies an allergist-mom is using to protect her family’s health
Like most parents, my children are my world. I would do anything to protect them and keep them healthy. It is Darwinian. Instinctual. Most of us get by with a combination of sage advice from generations past interspersed with a “know better do be…
Why I’m furious over observation status
A 37-year-old man was diagnosed with Lyme carditis after presenting to the emergency department (ED) with fever, weakness, history of tick bite, and prolonged PR interval of 394 ms (a type of heart block) and positive Lyme testing. In the ED, second-de…
The status quo is failing people with opioid use disorder
As we anticipated the release of new CDC data on overdose deaths, those of us who specialize in substance use disorders braced for grim statistics, but this milestone was still shocking: over 100,000 lives lost to overdoses in one year, the great major…
From the prison of my job to freedom
It became a prison to me — impending doom. I knew I had only three months left before I could retire. Three months isn’t long, but it is a lifetime away. That long drive to work in that heavy highway traffic where there was always a collision. Th…
