My phone chimed. I received an email stating that rotations were canceled, so I had effectively graduated medical school while sitting in the parking lot of my local grocery store. It felt like a natural end to an isolating day. That morning, the cherr…
An increasing number of institutions are relying on telemedicine to continue delivering care to patients in lieu of typical outpatient visits in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Telemedicine has been lauded as a potential equalizer in health care acc…
One of my favorite TV characters is Cliff Clavin, the know-it-all mailman on the TV show Cheers. I really like his quirky sense of humor and affection for interesting but useless facts. When I was in medical school and transcribed class notes to make …
Where are the kids? What are they doing? Are they learning anything? My stomach grows heavy, and my throat clogs. Are they eating? Are they safe? Good Lord, I hope that they are safe. As a pediatrician and as a mother of two, I regularly scan news arti…
The unspoken culture in medicine has been that to maintain objective professionalism – some measure of distance is encouraged between the clinician and the patient. From anatomy lab, students are encouraged to forget patients as fellow human bein…
The hurricane made landfall during the early morning hours. When I woke up, all I saw was devastation. Highway 288 transformed into a lake. The bayou running underneath was completely flooded with water spilling into the roads. The park, a place where …
As an academic internist, over the past five years, I’ve been hearing more and more about social determinants of health. I have read countless journal articles comparing health outcomes; I’ve attended grand rounds on the subject; recently, our electro…
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our lives upside down. It has wreaked havoc on the economy, leaving many jobless, and many industries questioning where their future lies. In my view, it has brought the weak infrastructure of the U.S. health care sys…
In 2002 pro baseball manager Billy Beane accomplished the impossible. He took the Oakland Athletics, a low-budget team comprised of unknown baseball players to the playoffs. The story’s magic is that he was able to compete with the Goliaths of the base…
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought with it a slew of challenges that were previously unimaginable for many of us. Social isolation, separation from beloved family members, the daily struggle to juggle work, parenting, and teaching in times of economic a…
