“The right choice of words, at the right time, can lift a person out of despair and literally save a person’s life, while an ill-chosen word, or worse, a purposely harsh one, can scar a person. The entire field of narrative medicine is formed aro…
Category: Infectious disease
Meet the physician who educates patients with cartoons [PODCAST]
Listen to psychiatrist Emily Watters’ work with the homeless population and how she got her start writing cartoons, educating patients using out-of-the-box communication strategies. Emily Watters is a psychiatrist and can be reached at The Cartoo…
COVID vaccines’ tragic dance [PODCAST]
“As a species, we have been an abject failure in dealing with a worldwide crisis. We politicize things for money, political reasons and some kind of weird power, even when it kills us in the process. We already have a World Health Organization (W…
You need a break from the front lines of health care
The current era of health care delivery has been aptly compared with going to war against an invisible enemy that can attack anywhere, at any time and with novel means. This invisible enemy was attacking the civilians as well as the “front line&#…
A physician’s COVID experience in spoken story
The following is a transcription of Dr. Deshpande’s spoken story. What is wrong with me? I’ve been doing this for 25 years. Why am I so scared now? That’s what I’m thinking as I drive to the hospital during the early part of the pandemic, March, …
Human connections, cancer care, and COVID-19 restrictions
The desire for human connection is so irrevocably and putatively a tenet of the human condition. The relationships we form with one another are quintessential in adding value to our lives and in fostering loving bonds. And the way we express this conne…
Our niche world demands a new approach to health
When Elvis Presley rolled up his sleeve and received the polio vaccine backstage at The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, most Americans knew about it. At the time, the only stars hotter than rock ‘n’ roll itself were Presley, the genre’s de facto king, and Su…
COVID 1 year later: thoughts from a small-town physician
This time last year, many of us were bewildered that our country and the world had been halted by a newly declared pandemic caused by a novel virus. Reports from physician colleagues on both coasts terrified me. Fast forward to June 2021, and 272 peopl…
Artificial intelligence, COVID-19, and the future of pandemics [PODCAST]
“Machine learning is only as good as the information provided to train the machine. Models trained on partial datasets can skew toward demographics that often turned up in the data—for example, Caucasians or men over 60. There is concern that “an…
When a COVID-19 microagression rears its ugly head
This past month, I was admitting a patient for a TIA, otherwise known as a “mini-stroke,” whose symptoms resolved by the time he got to the floor. In the interest of connecting with the patient during my taking of his history and physical, I usually as…
