I’ve always felt lucky and relieved when a cardiologist told me I seemed to be fine despite my heart condition. My condition, referred to as congenital, complete AV block, is estimated to affect between 1 in 15,000 to 22,000 live-born infants. Th…
Category: Conditions
A critical discussion is needed about planned death
“Planned death.” When you put it like that, this can only mean one of two things: suicide or murder. For most of us in medicine, the very idea of “planned death” seems safely outside our purview. After all, the bulk of medicine is concerned with stavin…
Paltering: When the truth is used to deceive
One evening in the clinic’s bullpen provider office, a colleague of mine wondered aloud how to respond to a difficult question a patient asked via patient portal message. A physician within earshot responded, “Just because someone asks you a question d…
A physician’s role in enlisting help to prevent suicide
A young man’s life is over too soon. He had been seen more than four times by more than ten different physicians and in four different clinical settings in the two weeks leading up to his death. Each time he was accompanied by a concerned loved o…
The suffocation of social isolation
Literature surrounding the effects of social isolation and loneliness for older adults is no longer lacking. Studies and articles outlining the dreadful consequences of these epidemics have even pierced large media outlets like Time magazine, where the…
Understanding the backlash to gaming disorder
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently announced the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases will have a new code: gaming disorder. For those who eagerly await play-by-play updates to ICD codes, this may be old information. …
5 misconceptions about incontinence
Incontinence is hard to talk about — many women choose to suffer in silence, finding it too embarrassing to talk about it with friends, family or a doctor. The truth is urinary incontinence affects millions of women — you’re not alone and there are sev…
5 misconceptions about incontinence
Incontinence is hard to talk about — many women choose to suffer in silence, finding it too embarrassing to talk about it with friends, family or a doctor. The truth is urinary incontinence affects millions of women — you’re not alone and there are sev…
Questions about the measles outbreak you were afraid to ask
There have been over 1,000 cases of measles in the first half of 2019–the most since 1992, according to the CDC. For comparison, 2018 had 372 cases. With New York at the center of the outbreak, it’s reasonable to have questions–from how to know if you’…
How to raise a resilient child
An excerpt from the Mayo Clinic Guide to Raising a Healthy Child. If you look it up in the dictionary, you might see the term resilience explained as having the ability to bounce or spring back into shape after being compressed, stretched or bent. Tree…
