Dental appointments for patients with special health care needs – especially those with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) – are no easy feat. Fraught with challenges, uncertainties, and fears, a dental appointment can be, at best, a try…
When you are older, you are considered a threat to other drivers. Reflexes are dampened, muscle responses are sluggish, cataracts obscure vision, and inflexible eye lenses slow focus. Cars are made to drive fast, and many whippersnappers navigate the s…
The first classification of primary headaches was developed in 1962 by the Ad Hoc Committee, a group of neurologists with a special interest in migraine. They correctly classified primary headaches, as per the published data, into: Vascular headache of…
An excerpt from The Mumbo Jumbo Fix: A Survival Guide for Effective Doctor-Patient-Nurse Communication. If you’re like me, you mark life’s timeline by three milestones—before COVID, during COVID, and after COVID. While most of us no longer …
(Trigger warning: suicide attempt) It was dinner time at this hospital’s psychiatric unit. They shuffled into the dining area—slippers, pajamas, disheveled, sad, lonely, depressed … and forgotten. Head count. All were present except for one…
Half of my family and many of my friends are doctors. I admire them enormously: they are smarter, work harder, and are more compassionate than any group I know. Yet sadly, they are all wimps. Despite non-stop carping about the dangers and cost of healt…
It’s one thing to choose a career dedicated to saving lives; it’s another altogether to confront the harsh reality of death. As a third-year medical student, my trauma surgery rotation highlighted that distinction. For all the patients we s…
When patients go to the hospital seeking help, they are vulnerable and fully trusting of the modern hospital system to do only what is needed and nothing more. And with good reason—patients are well aware of the incredible sacrifices doctors have made,…
Released in 2000, the landmark report “To Err is Human” aimed to transform patient safety by highlighting the prevalence of medical errors and their devastating impact. The report underscored various issues, including medication errors, fal…
Paolo Macchiarini, MD, is a thoracic surgeon and regenerative medicine researcher who gained international fame for pioneering surgeries that involved implanting synthetic tracheas seeded with the patient’s own stem cells. However, Macchiarini…
