On December 14th, 2021, hospital CEOs met under the guise of The Transformative CEO Healthcare Summit to brainstorm novel ideas in health care and to create “a new world ecosystem.” Themes included how to utilize medical data, how technolog…
Category: Infectious disease
A soul that never loses faith
I am so tired. Not in the usual “hard day at work,” but in a “deep-in-my-soul” tired. I am exhausted. I am heading into my third year as system medical director, where I lead a system-wide palliative medicine program in rural he…
Multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children: a pediatric hospitalist’s conversation
Them: “I have never heard of this.” Me: “That’s OK, let me explain what is going on. Your child has a condition called multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children, which we call MIS-C. We see this condition after a COVID infe…
The orphans of COVID: Who will care for them now?
The 911 call came too late. Her daughter was 32 years old and usually quite healthy. But she refused the COVID vaccinations. She said she took her vitamins and was healthy and that “God is my pilot” and “I don’t want toxins in my body.” Her mother knew…
COVID-19 and a call for unity
It’s 2022. COVID-19 is still here, and there is little evidence that it’s going away. Coronaviruses have been here longer than us and will be here after us. For centuries, we have co-existed with viruses, and our God-given immune systems ha…
Balancing care during COVID
I started this commentary when the initial COVID spike involving the mass hospitalization of unvaccinated individuals occurred, and non-COVID patients requiring hospitalization were turned away because no beds, especially in intensive care, were availa…
A milligram of understanding for the vaccine-hesitant [PODCAST]
“The starting point is to do our best to approach discussing COVID and vaccination with the appropriate type of empathy and understanding. To understand that our patients don’t have access to the same level of data and research that we do, and ev…
Kissing disease’s link to multiple sclerosis
In recent decades, mounting evidence has suggested the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a ubiquitous member of the herpes family that causes infectious mononucleosis (a.k.a. the “kissing disease”), can cause multiple sclerosis (MS). Last month, a …
Are we opening everything too quickly?
In “Open Everything” published in The Atlantic on February 9th, 2022, Yascha Mounk discusses his arguments for lifting any remaining COVID-19 restrictions to “shake off the pandemic malaise.” He asserts that we are “in dan…
Viral nomenclature or a sign of our times?
As Pandora’s box of coronavirus opened in 2020, it engulfed our planet into an abysmal nightmare. As darkness fell, those of us in medicine sought refuge under a lamp called “knowledge” that sparked its flame from scientific evidence….
