I have worked part-time as an applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapist for the last few years. The job isn’t complicated, and where I am, one doesn’t need a specifically tailored education or license to practice under supervision. An ABA&#…
Category: Conditions
Do protocols and pathways improve care?
As I’ve written before, I have to confess I’ve never been a huge fan of pathways and protocols. They often struck me as rigid and insensitive to the nuances of differences between patients. There are also times when they are just absurd whe…
Bridging the gap between the bedside and the bench in the fight against COVID-19
On March 16 — the same day that the nation’s first shelter-in-place orders were announced in the San Francisco Bay Area — a Seattle woman rolled up her sleeve to take the first experimental dose of a possible COVID-19 vaccine. “We all feel so helpless,…
The COVID winter is coming. The time to prepare is now.
The motto of the House of Stark from Game of Thrones is “winter is coming.” The meaning is a warning to remain vigilant as there are troubling times ahead. This motto applies to both mental illness and the COVID pandemic. There was a brief time where …
It is overwhelming hopelessness that crushes caregivers’ collective souls
I started my medical training in the late 1990s. This was after the AIDS epidemic; that is to say, by that time, the human immunodeficiency virus was known, and there were already proven treatments. So, for doctors of a certain age, this is the first t…
Orthopedic surgery enters the modern age on a chance observation
For thousands of years, bonesetters and doctors could not accurately diagnosis broken bones or differentiate such injuries from joint dislocations and torn ligaments. That changed with a chance discovery almost exactly 125 years ago. Subsequently, perh…
The need for on-demand access to medical technologies when treating COVID-19 patients
It’s well known that New York City was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring, having been the epicenter of U.S. cases for several weeks. As I write this, more than 245,000 of my fellow New Yorkers have been stricken, and an estimated one in t…
Female physician suicides: a silent pandemic
“Aunty blew her brains out a few weeks ago!” Words I shall never forget. For weeks, she had been in my thoughts. But I never called her. I didn’t because of all the myriad reasons we often give ourselves for not checking up on each other. In my case, t…
A physician at the precipice of the pandemic’s next wave
We sit silently on this precipice—my family, my friends, my colleagues. Time spins. Momentum is building. It is a tidal wave slowly moving towards us. We are fixed in its path of raging destruction. It is our enemy, not each other. Each tick on th…
Advice from a psychiatrist during these unprecedented times
Unprecedented. How many times have we heard that word? Yet, here we balance between the life we knew and the life we long for with the deep, frightening chasm of the unknown strikingly in between. 2020 has not only been one for the history books; it ha…
