An excerpt from The Committee Will Kill You Now. “You couldn’t get her niece to budge on the hemodialysis decision?” Harper sank into the resident lounge’s threadbare couch and kicked up her feet. “Nope.” Noah slumpe…
Category: Nephrology
The dark truth about dialysis
When a colleague recommended a book, I hoped it would be something enjoyable – perhaps a sports anthology, a music biography, or even a novel. Unfortunately, it was about dialysis, the great American scam that it is. As a nephrologist (kidney doc…
A patient’s resilience and the challenge of dialysis
After she developed a serious complication, she wanted to know the facts plainly stated. I told her the treatment would change her quality of life; it would be hard but doable. To this, she replied, “Now, don’t bullsh*t me, I don’t li…
The unjust reality of racial disparities in pediatric kidney transplants
I noticed a troublesome trend during my three weeks working in the pediatric dialysis unit and the post-kidney transplant unit. The whiter and younger pediatric patients were resting comfortably in the post-transplant unit with their new surgically pla…
Is AI the solution for the shortage of nephrologists? ChatGPT weighs in.
As I’m sure you know, nephrology is the branch of internal medicine that deals with the kidneys. And in the U.S., young doctors are quite unlikely to choose this path. Why? The combination of long hours, chronic illness, and (relatively) unimpres…
Providing clean water to remote villages: the dialyzer filtration system
Those of us who live in developed nations generally take for granted that we have ready access to clean water. Yet, the World Health Organization estimates that over two billion people worldwide must drink unsafe water. This problem is often greatest i…
Ensuring equitable, quality treatment of pain in Black and marginalized people
In my recent TEDx Talk titled, Why Black Patients Don’t Trust the Healthcare System, I explored racially-based medical algorithms and their impact on health outcomes for Black patients. As a physician, I believe such algorithms have no place in the mod…
The evolving role of physicians in health care
Health care has changed dramatically in the last decades, from the introduction of electronic medical records to the COVID-19 pandemic serving as a catalyst for telehealth and virtual care options to the increased familiarity with digital therapeutics,…
A story of medicine’s stolen children
It was a Monday two years ago. I was still fresh from coming back from having been out of school from a COVID break. I was no older than 22, and I was in my pediatrics clerkship. I was greener than a freshly watered lawn, and I felt every bit of it. It…
Doctors with borders
During my internal medicine internship in 1980 a professor chided our team because housestaff no longer prepared and interpreted peripheral blood smears. He scoffed that they don’t make doctors like they used to. I have heard similar lamentations thr…
