“I suspect that some of the nearly 20 percent of physicians who have quit their jobs during this pandemic needed to feel this relief, too. They needed to feel the relief of having no plan. No ‘if this, then that.’ They needed to just …
Category: COVID
Before taking Paxlovid, consider these drug interactions
FDA and Health Canada recently approved Paxlovid as an oral treatment option for mild-to-moderate COVID-19 who are at high risk of progression to severe COVID-19. It is a combination drug containing nirmatrelvir/ritonavir. Nirmatrelvir works by binding…
Can patients just say no to treatment? [PODCAST]
“Deeming individuals ‘non-decisional’ for misinformed beliefs that are not representative of a psychiatric illness is inappropriate, unfairly medicalizes the narrative and incurs a risk of further public distrust of the health care sy…
To treat future COVID variants, we need more than vaccines [PODCAST]
“With government and industry working hand in hand, we can develop and stockpile monoclonal antibody therapeutics in anticipation of variants to come. We need to be thinking several moves ahead to keep ahead of variants so that stockpiles of ther…
Inside the race to conquer the COVID-19 pandemic [PODCAST]
“That year, 2020, Uğur told the crowd, would be the year BioNTech proved the doubters wrong. There was no time to lose. Soon after he’d finished his talk, Uğur hopped on a plane to Seattle, where he met with a team at the Bill & Melinda Gates…
Managing expectations during COVID-19 [PODCAST]
“I had sent an email to some key people in my organization about managing patients’ expectations and how that needed to be addressed differently on an organizational level. The truth of the matter is that I am powerless to change the way the syst…
Unrequited: love in the time of COVID-19 [PODCAST]
“If you knew we are like the ‘Two Fridas,’ that our hearts are connected, would you change your mind? Would you stop as you are about to cut the artery feeding your heart and mine? If you knew that when you cry because of your lonelin…
What’s wrong? Patients use disinformation to blame doctors.
“You were doing it wrong.” The patient in my pulmonary clinic for follow-up after her discharge from a hospitalization in January of this year for COVID-19 pneumonia was explaining why she would not reconsider getting vaccinated despite her…
COVID and obstetrics: a physician shares her story [PODCAST]
“I thought of her with each miscarriage I saw in COVID+ mothers, and during each delivery of premature rupture of membranes due to infection. I thought of her every time I gave steroids, increased the oxygen flow for someone struggling to breathe…
To treat future covid variants, we need more than vaccines
The world is constantly trying to keep up with the latest COVID-19 variant – from Alpha to Omicron and now Omicron’s cousin BA.2, we have seen how contagious and virulent these variants can be. Viruses are wily adversaries, and they mutate both t…
