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…
Category: Infectious disease
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…
COVID-19 misinformation is a public health crisis
As a medical student, I have discussed with classmates and faculty how to handle a potential patient interaction on vaccinations. Learning how to handle a patient who may be misinformed may be best through experience rather than lectures. During the CO…
Is upspeak really that bad for women in medicine?
A few weeks ago, I was delighted when KevinMD accepted an opinion piece I’d submitted. But I withdrew it just before publication because, on reflection, I realized that I’d been wrong. While sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic,…
COVID-19: Here’s how to gain the public’s trust
As we all grapple with what it means to live in society battling a global pandemic that is so fundamentally altering the way we interact with one another, we are faced with several questions we haven’t faced before in our lifetime: how are we goi…
