November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month, a time when many people in my profession shine a spotlight on the dangers of taking lung health for granted. This year, few need the reminder. COVID-19 is deadly, contagious, and upending life as we know it. It …
I have a video visit in the pulmonary clinic with one of my favorite patients. I ask her how she’s doing and wave to her husband sitting in the background of the living room where she is set up. Deborah says, “We’re good. We’re healthy. We are staying …
If you’re in health care, chances are you’ve heard one of these statements: “Masking doesn’t work.” “We’re all going to get COVID, so why mask?” Another is “COVID is just like the flu.” Or you’ve even heard, “Those people who died of COVID would have …
Cardiologists with national reputations were available at a hospital just an hour away. I had connections there and could get what I was sure would be better care for my mother than she would receive in the small hospital where she had been taken follo…
She was dead when we walked in the room. Lungs ventilated, kidneys dialyzed, on pressors to maintain enough tension within her blood vessels to keep blood traveling to her brain and with a tentatively beating heart, but dead, nonetheless. The microbes …
Narcissism is a term that has roots in Greek mythology, and as the story goes, a nymph named Echo fell in love with a handsome young man named Narcissus, who loved nobody but himself. Echo had previously been cursed by a vengeful goddess who took from …
I really shouldn’t complain. I haven’t lost my housing or job. I have plenty of food and toilet paper, and so far, no close friend or family have died from COVID. That said, this pandemic is hard. In fact, it is exhausting. During the spring and summer…
As the burden of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) plateaus into a perpetual state of public health emergency for 2020, examining the United States’ forgotten epidemic of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) offers insight to a COVID-19 solution. STIs…
As we continue to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic causing spiking numbers of cases, the scientific and medical communities continue to search for effective treatments and preventive measures. We have clearly established the importance of wearing masks…
An excerpt from Medical Myths: A Sceptic’s Journey. “Don’t go out tonight, ‘Cos it’s bound to change your life, There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise.” – Creedence Clearwater Revival, August 1969 On a summer’s night on the St. Lawrence…
