I’ve always been afraid of driving. My home is quite far away from my hospital, and for the past eight years, I’ve been traveling via Uber for my daily commute. I don’t have a good memory of roads, lanes, and streets, even in my own c…
Category: Oncology/Hematology
Finding joy beyond medicine: a tale of pet companionship
My question to all the health care workers is, “Have you ever kept pets or tried to keep them?” If the answer is “yes,” then you are indeed very lucky. I think there are only two sources that can bring utter joy to humans in thi…
Which study is right? Investigating the impact of screening on breast cancer mortality
A splashy headline in The Washington Post caught my attention: “Breast cancer death rate dropped 58 percent over 44 years in U.S.” A Stanford Medicine news story reports that this victorious conclusion is based on “a new multicenter s…
Gene therapy’s impact on incurable illnesses
Gene therapy has been used recently to cure previously incurable diseases, including sickle cell anemia. It is a horrible disease that I have seen so many times in the ER that it haunts me at night, especially one patient. He was a sweet man with a lov…
Navigating crucial conversations in health care [PODCAST]
Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes! We sit down with Kim Downey, a physical therapist, and Frances Mei Hardin, an otolaryngologist, to dive into the nuances of navigating difficult discussions in the medical…
Suspicions of medical child abuse delayed my child’s cancer diagnosis
It was November 2014. I was leaving the parking structure of my local children’s hospital when I realized, “They don’t believe us.” I didn’t know it at the time, but it would take seven more months to find the cause of my …
Confronting colon cancer: a daughter’s regretful journey
My mother. 63 years old. Colon cancer. She first noticed rectal bleeding. She made excuses. Maybe it’s hemorrhoids. She put her physician on a pedestal. He said, “You’re too young to die,” and there was no need for further tests…
The curse of the excellent doctor
The reward for good work is always more work. The employer becomes dependent on the quality of work that you do because he knows that you, as a person, are a workaholic and perfectionist. You put your heart and soul into everything you do. No other emp…
Why minorities need more representation in breast cancer research
I’ve always been interested in democratizing health care and have tried to incorporate this in my image-guided therapeutics research. As a health care CEO, I’ve been afforded the opportunity to broaden my research scope and examine a personal area of i…
Evolution of targeted cancer therapies: a radiation oncologist’s perspective
On July 1, 1987, I started treating cancer patients as a full-time radiation oncologist – a cancer specialist who uses radiation therapy to help cancer patients beat their disease. Now, nearly 37 years later, I have the privilege of caring for cancer p…
