Category: Infectious disease

How to find joy in prison 

This question resonates in my mind each day I pass through the prison gatehouse.  The gatehouse is a physical barrier and a mental one, separating the outside from the inside, seceding the lives of people who guard and care for inmates from the lives o…

Reimagining medical education from within a pandemic

The Prussian pathologist, Rudolf Virchow, who gave us Virchow’s triad: hypercoagulability, endothelial injury, blood flow stasis also gave us the foundations of social medicine, claiming that “physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor” and shoul…

COVID-related stressors and increasing instances of substance abuse [PODCAST]

“While the rise in substance use disorders during COVID will become more apparent as the pandemic eventually ebbs, the silver lining is that this is not a novel problem. We understand substance use disorders far better than we understand COVID-19…

In honor of Benjamin Franklin: Choose prevention

When I was a high school student, my calculus teacher stood eager to use her new electronic board.  She admitted to doing derivatives for fun on the weekends. I admired the way she looked at a complex math problem and solved it with ease. Even more not…

A tale of two epidemics: COVID and obesity

Millions worldwide have had COVID-19. The largest obstacle to reining in this virus’s spread is that the range of symptoms is unpredictable, from minimal to severe respiratory compromise with diffuse lung damage and death. As COVID-19 initially m…

Positive growth from the COVID-19 pandemic 

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected almost everyone, whether directly, through the loss of loved ones, or its impact on job security. Business has slowed down in many sectors and has been put into a standstill. It became clear that things we thought wer…

Will women in medicine survive COVID-19?

How are two-career households with children — let alone single-parent households — going to manage with daycare centers and schools closed, perhaps for a long time to come? What damage will this do to career progression and earning potential if one par…

Bridging the gap between the bedside and the bench in the fight against COVID-19

On March 16 — the same day that the nation’s first shelter-in-place orders were announced in the San Francisco Bay Area — a Seattle woman rolled up her sleeve to take the first experimental dose of a possible COVID-19 vaccine. “We all feel so helpless,…

The COVID winter is coming. The time to prepare is now.

The motto of the House of Stark from Game of Thrones is “winter is coming.” The meaning is a warning to remain vigilant as there are troubling times ahead. This motto applies to both mental illness and the COVID pandemic.  There was a brief time where …

How to balance family and professional needs during the pandemic [PODCAST]

“The reality of being a medical practice owner is that we are small business owners and very vulnerable to the impact of COVID. Having previously worked in the telemedicine industry and because I am a psychiatrist, I initially felt that I was in …