Canadians with serious or progressive chronic illness are feeling especially vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has underscored how quickly circumstances can change. Talking about a serious illness diagnosis and the impact on life expectancy i…
We first met about two years ago when she came to see me in my clinic as a new patient. I glanced through her chart and reviewed her scans and pathology reports. She had one of the worst possible kinds of lung cancers, called small cell lung cancer, th…
When a patient is dissatisfied with his or her care, he or she can consult an attorney, who will enlist a physician “expert” to determine if a doctor has deviated from the standard of care and whether that deviation caused a negative outcome. Over the …
I’m “blursed.” I have a loving and supportive family, an amazing wife, great friends, and that includes my dog, a career that is both secure and fulfilling, and yet there is something I carry with me that perpetually threatens to break my spirit. My fe…
An excerpt from Injured to Elite: A Guide To Empowering Yourself to Transform Your Life After Injury. Don’t be the patient that says: “Doc, just tell me what to do …” Instead, you should ask for information to empower yourself to make decisions a…
For the past year, we have been inundated with statistics about the impact of COVID-19 on our lives. Reports of daily case rates, hospitalizations, and deaths are so pervasive that they have become routine fodder for “water cooler” and dinner table c…
She frowned at me, as she stepped off her truck’s side-rail and onto the pavement. If her mask had not been tightly pulling up from under the woman’s chin, it would have been harder to see her disgust with not just our vaccination event, bu…
Emily Watters is a physician who explains the side effects of the mRNA (Pfizer and Moderna) and viral-vector (Johnson & Johnson) vaccines (click to enlarge): Emily Watters is a psychiatrist and can be reached at The Cartoon Shrink. Image credits: E…
As a general surgeon, being called into the emergency room to perform a bedside procedure is par for the course. After gathering the standard list of supplies, I ran through another checklist before entering the room of a recent patient. N95, surgical …
In early 2020 the COVID-19 virus descended upon all of us in the U.S. No longer something we would anxiously read about in the news from outside our shores, this new public health dilemma had touched down close to home. Before long, the WHO would proc…
