The unspoken culture in medicine has been that to maintain objective professionalism – some measure of distance is encouraged between the clinician and the patient. From anatomy lab, students are encouraged to forget patients as fellow human bein…
Category: Conditions
COVID-19? We are not even ready for a hurricane.
The hurricane made landfall during the early morning hours. When I woke up, all I saw was devastation. Highway 288 transformed into a lake. The bayou running underneath was completely flooded with water spilling into the roads. The park, a place where …
Nurses do not get paid extra for being pharmacists
An excerpt from Nurses are Nuts. The pharmacy department plays a vital role in hospitals. They prepare and dispense medications. Sometimes the pharmacist will receive an order from the doctor on a med whose written dosage he is not sure of. In some cas…
From frontlines to sidelined: a resident’s experience on staying positive
On a gorgeous day in early March, I set out on my usual morning commute to clinic. The recent rain had turned the mountains green, there was some fresh snow atop Mount Baldy in the usually dry Inland Empire of Southern California, and the Lakers had ju…
Patients who slip through the cracks
As my surgery rotation commenced, I fully expected to be immersed in the unfamiliar territory of “scrubbing in” and “sterile fields.” While I discovered the difference between vertical and horizontal mattress sutures, two specif…
A physician-mother comforts her frightened, 6-year-old daughter
It’s Monday morning at 7:15 a.m. Our kids, ages 6 and 9, have just finished breakfast, and they know to get their shoes on to go for a walk. We are hand-in-hand, slowly waking up as we put one foot in front of the other. We ambled down our neighborhood…
An advertisement for COVID 2020
Have you ever felt completely overwhelmed both at work and at home? Perhaps you’re thinking, my job as an anesthesiologist isn’t anxiety-provoking enough; I should probably homeschool my kids at the same time. When’s the last time you uttered the phras…
The plausible positive alternative to COVID-19
Do you remember those old cartoons with the angel or good guy on one shoulder and the little devil or bad guy on the other? Of course, the good guy was always trying to keep the character out of mischief, and certainly, the little devil was doing quite…
The exacerbation of social isolation among the elderly
COVID-19 has rapidly spread across the nation, leading to the implementation of stringent social distancing guidelines by local and regional authorities. In a desperate effort to limit infection rates, in-person social interactions have been reduced, a…
Who should we really be testing for COVID-19?
The Canadian federal government recently announced it would fund at least one million blood tests to track the novel coronavirus over the next two years. This is a step in the right direction. But is it enough? How do we know if we are testing the ri…
