Category: Infectious disease

My new normal moral injury

Whatever we call it—burnout, moral injury, disillusionment, work fatigue, hopelessness—these did not appear to apply to me before the COVID-19 pandemic. I tried to keep up on discussions about how moral injury is a pervasive and destructive force leadi…

International medical graduates are crucial in our battle against COVID-19

This past year, I served as an internal medicine resident at St. John’s Riverside Hospital in Yonkers, New York. And this month, I officially started my anesthesiology residency at Brown. Working as a doctor amid the coronavirus pandemic has been…

How physicians can share health information and manage dissent online [PODCAST]

“In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, I am both hopeful and inspired as well as disappointed. I see those angry that their ideas or opinions conflict with science. Instead of the steady path and hard work of building bridges, they create divisio…

The loss of a paycheck is a major traumatic situation. The loss of life is worse.

It’s mid-summer. Time for family vacations, camping trips, backyard barbeques with family and friends, all the great things we look forward to during those cold days of winter. However, where do most of us find ourselves right now? I’ll tel…

Physicians’ role in bridging the COVID-19 health recommendations divide

It has been a summer of disconcerting milestones for the US. Over 4 million people have now been infected with the novel coronavirus, and over 140,000 have lost their lives according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The country reported over 77,0…

Should I send my child back to school? A letter to parents.

This is the million-dollar question that I’ve been asked over and over again by distraught parents wanting to do right by their children. Parents want to have their children stay home so they can keep them healthy and safe. At the same time, they are w…

Physicians and the psychological trauma of COVID-19 [PODCAST]

“As COVID-19 devastates America and the world, I hope that fundamental change to our health care system results from its horrific exposé. Without COVID-19, the pressures placed on physicians are already immense. In the age of COVID-19, these pres…

What it’s like to be pregnant in a pandemic

I held back my tears as I headed home that day from work. A sense of impending doom and fear of the future was clutching my heart, something like I have never experienced before. For the first time in my medical career, my mind was preoccupied with tho…

The virus takes and it takes. Physicians give and they give.

A lifetime ago, when we first heard of a novel virus making the rounds in China, I was added to several physician groups on Facebook. The discussion surrounding the virus was academic; the distance made it easy to be objective, speculation on how sever…

“COVID doesn’t affect children.” You may want to rethink that.

Walking into the COVID ward in the children’s hospital, those words seemed etched on an invisible wall, a wall that I wanted to choose to stay behind.  It was a wall I could stay behind for the first couple months of the pandemic where multiple studies…