The coronavirus pandemic has incited the necessary fear amongst the public and health care workers. This fear is a positive driver of social distancing and other precautionary measures that assist in protecting health care workers and patients. However…
As a health care system, we have united during the COVID-19 public health threat to embrace social distancing and “flatten the curve.” In order to conserve scarce resources and limit viral transmission, we health care providers have canceled elective …
When physicians present at medical conferences, we usually start with a slide disclosing any potential conflicts of interest to our audience. I probably need to disclose two things here. First, I’m an infuriating and inexhaustible optimist. Second, I’m…
As I sit here writing this, one of my friends and colleagues is on a ventilator. He’s fighting for his life. He’s a very healthy guy who runs marathons; we even did some race training together a couple of years back. And now, he’s in critical condition…
In between snippets of conversation exchanged with my husband about how the first day of remote learning went for our 9 year old and whether the latest nanny was likely to quit given health risks associated with working in a two-physician frontline wor…
Today, we got called on a patient in the ICU who recently had a new brain mass removed surgically. The specimen came back positive for an aggressive brain tumor known as glioblastoma multiforme. We discussed his diagnosis and prognosis with him at beds…
In cancer language, it’s not unusual for the medical or scientific meaning of a word to be different from the way the same word is understood in everyday language. Sometimes the difference reflects a focus on populations vs. individuals, and in that ca…
Charles looks older than his sixty-one years; he is very thin and quite stooped, and his eyes are what I guess are described as “lazy.” One goes one way, and one another. He is badly in need of dental work. He has emphysema, though he conti…
Do you remember when you were a bright-eyed pre-med student, head bowed at the computer, typing your personal statement? Type, type … backspace, backspace … type. You didn’t want to use the phrase “to help people” in your statement as your reason for w…
An excerpt from Of Plagues and Vampires: Believable Myths and Unbelievable Facts from Medical Practice. The concept of a vampire predates Bram Stoker’s tales of Count Dracula – probably by several centuries. But did vampires ever really exist? In…
