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…
Category: Nephrology
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…
Remote patient monitoring: a health IT perspective [PODCAST]
“The primary benefits for mobile care units are the fact that they decrease patient travel times by arriving at their residences and ensuring that appointments are never missed. It also relieves the stress of finding transportation for dialysis p…
Using nanoparticles to treat polycystic kidney disease [PODCAST]
“Excited by the promise our research holds for PKD patients, we have been packaging a variety of PKD drugs into our nanoparticles, testing their ability to act as a courier service for renal drug delivery. We’ve been testing this process on drugs…
Will U.S. health care match Native Americans’ treatment of chronic kidney disease?
For years, hypertension has dominated the health care field, afflicting 45 percent of all adult Americans. Another disease that has gained renown in the world of health care is diabetes, afflicting 10.5 percent of the U.S. population. Health care profe…
Nephrology and kidney care during the pandemic [PODCAST]
“COVID-19 wreaks havoc on multiple areas of the body, and myself and my fellow frontline workers across the globe have been forced to quickly identify what tools work best in our quest to keep our patients alive. While we’re working to identify w…
