I have been a physician for almost twenty years. The AIDS pandemic has been the greatest public health calamity of my career. Global Health Observatory data estimates that approximately 32 million people have died from HIV-related illnesses since the d…
Despite four years of medical school, three years of residency, and over a decade in practice, I was never taught the profound connection between high childhood stress and increased risk of chronic disease. It was at a community event sponsored by our …
I am a physician. I have worked hard to get where I am in life. I went into medicine for many reasons. The intellectual challenges. Being in a field with lots of human interaction. And of course to help people. I went into emergency medicine because I …
Coronavirus is sweeping across the world, cities are shutting down, hospitals overflowing, the economy crashing, and suddenly your cranial nerve mnemonic feels like the last thing you should be focusing on. But while the world screeches to a halt, medi…
The front desk staff member who checks you in at your primary care physician’s office is 64 years old with a history of hypertension and coronary artery disease. She unexpectedly became a widower five years ago and is planning to work until the age of …
On a sticky summer day four years ago, a class of eager medical students and I harmoniously chimed the Hippocratic oath, binding us to the highest standards and code of medical ethics. As newly accepted and unassuming medical students, how could we und…
Since graduating from medical school in 2002, I have seen a disturbing trend in the lives of doctors. For years, physicians have been squeezed from every direction. Insurance companies and hospitals are constantly fighting to remove our autonomy. The a…
As doctors, we know how this disease progresses. We know the prognosis for patients who need to be on a ventilator. We know that if we have a cardiac arrest during the course of COVID infection, our prognosis gets much grimmer. Faced with this knowledg…
I just lost my uncle to COVID-19. I am writing this to honor him because I cannot leave the country to travel to Canada to see him, I could not visit him in the hospital when he needed us the most, I cannot attend his funeral, and I could not tell him …
Nurses are responsible for patient care. They are the ones at the bedside 24/7. There is no one who spends more time with individual patients. They are the ones most in danger in the coronavirus pandemic. The news gets grimmer every day about the inevi…
