With sixteen years of experience working with dermatology residents, my role as a program coordinator has evolved immensely. Within the auspices of graduate medical education (GME), I manage the dermatology residency program, projects, and program budg…
It was that bewitching hour. 0300. Behavioral health unit/behavioral health intensive care unit. She was a small young woman. Her eyes appeared black as coal, as if her soul had been sucked out repeatedly. There were bruises around her eyes, black and …
For over twenty years, I’ve had a recurring nightmare: I’m back in medical training, and my patient is crashing. To save them, I must enter my medical orders into the electronic health record (EHR). The only problem is, there are no open co…
According to the National Institutes of Health, the majority of individuals experience several traumatic events in their lifetimes, but do they all develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? If you question the general populace or the media, they w…
Recently, I encountered a stark reminder of the challenges facing our mental health care system. A 16-year-old Black boy came to us at Boston Community Pediatrics (BCP) in a state of crisis, expressing suicidal thoughts and a deep sense of fear. As par…
I recently encountered a new patient, a seemingly healthy 25-year-old man who had just graduated from college and was working his first job. He was not a tobacco user and had no medical diagnoses, but shoulder and abdominal pain brought him to Mass Gen…
In the weeks after her mother died, Stacy’s mind was filled with thoughts about things she believed she’d done wrong and ways she’d let her mother down. “I shouldn’t have gotten so impatient with her”; “I shoul…
An excerpt from Disabled Ecologies. The multicolored poisonous waste disposed of by Hughes Aircraft Company was never just TCE, the most infamous ingredient. It was always a toxic soup: dozens of volatile organic compounds and heavy metals, contaminant…
As a patient advocate, I have witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of policies leading to untreated and undertreated pain. As a mother who has lost a child to drug poisoning, I have also witnessed how drug policy is driving an increasingly letha…
For years, the U.S. public has been hearing that prescription opioid pain relievers are always and forever a bad thing—and that doctors and big pharma companies are supposedly responsible for an epidemic of addiction and drug overdose-related deaths. H…
