It’s Wednesday at 3:27 p.m. I was just in the kitchen cutting potatoes for a belated birthday dinner which, ironically, will be happening very early this evening. I noticed a missed text on my phone and decided to call back, as was requested. It was fr…
Like many scary health scenarios where patients seek some modicum of influence, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to patient demand for “immune-boosting” dietary supplements. Toilet paper wasn’t the only essential item being limited by stores; bottles of z…
It was September 11, 2001. My dad had cheated on my mom again, the building that I worked in at that time had received an anonymous tip that we were a potential target for the terrorist attacks, and my mom, who needed a reprieve from my dad’s crap, was…
Family lore recalls that my grandfather, succumbing to stomach cancer in the mid-1960s, “died addicted to morphine.” Decades before the AIDS crisis sparked the hospice and palliative care movements, the confluences of pain, dependence, and addiction we…
Do you know what it’s like to sit in a meeting and learn that something you hold close as a fundamental principle is probably not as fundamentally true as you thought? That’s the way I felt earlier this week while attending a meeting on the quality of …
Just this week, the administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse a lower court ruling allowing women to receive telemedicine abortion services and pills delivered by mail during the COVID-19 pandemic. If Trump wins, millions of women across t…
An excerpt from Medical Marijuana: A Clinical Handbook. Imagine two patients sitting in the waiting area of a clinic. The first is a man in his sunset years who has recently begun treatment for stage 2 lung cancer. His treatment involves the use of che…
President Trump recently signed two executive orders directly related to prescription drug prices in the U.S. One order would allow the “reimportation” of prescription drugs from Canada. This longstanding idea would allow U.S. pharmacies an…
Click through North Dakota’s Division of Medical Marijuana website, past the addresses of every cannabis dispensary in the state, into the presentations and annual reports, and you’ll eventually come to a 32-slide presentation about the sta…
When I was in Sweden, I heard this phrase several times: “There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad preparation.” They said this when we asked them what they did with their children in dead of winter. The proud parents made it very clear that no …
