The U.S. infant mortality rate, children who die under one year of age, rose to its highest rate in two decades in 2022, up about 3 percent to 5.6 infant deaths per 1,000 live births. At the same time, the nation’s neonatal mortality rate, infant…
Category: Hospital-Based Medicine
The voice that saved lives: a doctor’s pandemic hero
I would not recognize her if she crossed before me on the street. I could not pick her out in a staff photo of her and her colleagues. I do not know the color of her hair or skin; I could not even guess if she is short or tall. But her voice—I know her…
The curse of the excellent doctor
The reward for good work is always more work. The employer becomes dependent on the quality of work that you do because he knows that you, as a person, are a workaholic and perfectionist. You put your heart and soul into everything you do. No other emp…
Hospital retaliation and my fight for patient rights
I found myself compelled into the complex world of health care advocacy under extraordinary circumstances last year when I went to my university administration to request a table to do a free speech petition because of a personal and troubling experien…
Sepsis protocols coupled with rapid host response technologies are the key to improving patient outcomes
Patients come into the emergency department (ED) with symptoms, not diagnoses. That’s when time is of the essence. Clinicians must quickly triage patients and establish an appropriate care pathway to obtain the best possible outcome. The time-sen…
How to face our mistakes: Using the military’s after-action review to improve morbidity and mortality conferences
Nearly three decades ago, David Hilfiker, a family medicine physician in rural Minnesota, authored an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Facing our mistakes.” In the piece, he chronicles three major medical mistakes he mad…
From intern to witness: Working in a resource-limited health care system
A little anecdote The year was 2022, and it marked the first month of my initial rotation at one of the largest tertiary care hospitals in Punjab, Pakistan. After having assisted with several procedures in the ENT operating room one morning, I found my…
Inside the heart of a hospital: love, loss, and resilience
“Airports have seen more sincere kisses than wedding halls and the walls of hospitals have heard more prayers than the walls of churches.” – Anonymous It’s 1 a.m. in the night. I am on call duty, which starts at 8:30 a.m. in the morni…
Sham peer review epidemic: A doctor’s career destroyed
An excerpt from The Medical Matrix: One Physician’s Story Maneuvering the Minefields of Medicine. It was a routine Monday morning in the middle of May 2011. I had custody of my boys that day, so I dropped them off at school and headed to work. As…
Discover the physician who made a village his family
I finished my residency training on June 30th, 2000, in a combined internal medicine and pediatrics residency program at Ohio State University and Columbus Children’s Hospital (before it was renamed Nationwide Children’s Hospital). One mont…
