Category: Conditions

It’s time to stop stigmatizing long COVID patients with mental health conditions

Mental health conditions are common among individuals with long COVID due to various factors. These include the direct effects of COVID-19 on the body, such as neuroinflammation, as well as the circumstances often associated with the condition, such as…

Can minors truly consent to reversible puberty blockers in gender-affirming health care?

Gender-affirming health care (GAH) is a rapidly developing sector within the medical profession that can include indirect therapies such as counseling, direct therapies such as hormone treatments, puberty blockers, or gender-affirming surgeries. A main…

Is obesity really a disease?

Obesity is unquestionably a major risk factor for disease and an increasingly serious societal problem, but is it actually a disease? I would argue that obesity, defined purely by a BMI of >30, is really just a number – an objective finding. In the…

Food allergies are not preferences. Let’s start treating them that way.

We’re in a rapidly growing food allergy epidemic. 1 in 13 American children have food allergies—a number that’s only growing. Private insurance claims of anaphylactic food reactions, which are severe and potentially life-threatening, rose 377 percent f…

The surprising power of lifestyle and diet changes to prevent infertility

An excerpt from What to Eat When You Want to Get Pregnant. I know firsthand how hard infertility can be to talk about. Personally, I struggled conceiving my second daughter, and I am an advocate for taking control of your own fertility through lifestyl…

Ending the opioid crisis starts with physicians

A recently published opinion article by opioid advocates attempts to assuage physicians’ prescribing guilt, arguing “doctors prescribing to their patients did not create the U.S. opioid crisis.” As lawsuit after lawsuit concludes, Pur…

Our institutions have given up on the COVID-19 pandemic. We should not.

The COVID-19 pandemic is over. On May 5, The World Health Organization announced that COVID-19 was no longer a public health emergency. The U.S. followed suit on May 11, allowing the public health emergency declaration to expire. The pandemic did not e…

Uncovering the truth about genetic mutations and weight loss

“I do not feel full even after I eat” is what I heard from so many of my patients. Even after bariatric surgery, this feeling of fullness would go away initially but then it would come back, and they found themselves again overindulging. Wh…

Accessing needed pediatric mental health care was difficult before the pandemic and is now at crisis levels

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit kids hard. Their mental well-being was already tenuous before the pandemic, and COVID-19 has only exacerbated what was already a crisis of anxiety, depression, and suicidality among youth. Getting treatment for adolescents…

Life and death in the ICU: a night of heroism, tragedy, and budgetary battles

ICU: Our acuities were high, and staffing was low. Our ICU, with 24 beds, was already full. The staffing situation for that night was so poor that instead of our RNs having a 2:1 patient-nurse ratio, we were forced into 3:1 assignments. Despite the cha…