I spent my early and mid-career years working in a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) at a large academic center. We did almost everything except for a few things esoteric at the time — small bowel transplants, a few kinds of experimental surgery. I’…
You’ve probably seen it on the news – a rare, polio-like illness is causing cases of paralysis in children. Here’s the latest info, based on our best current knowledge from the CDC. Acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) is a sudden illness that causes weakness …
You’ve probably seen it on the news – a rare, polio-like illness is causing cases of paralysis in children. Here’s the latest info, based on our best current knowledge from the CDC. Acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) is a sudden illness that causes weakness …
A couple of years ago, I read an article by Dr. Profeta at LinkedIn called “These four words that may offend you … may also just save you.” He was invited to talk about burnout in medicine and did not get a warm reception. “It&#…
Imagine this scenario. Your two-year-old son has had a runny nose for a day or two and an occasional cough, but seemed no worse to you that everyone else in his preschool class. Two hours after you put him to bed you hear him coughing, only this cough …
This is not a story about anti-vaxxers. This is a story about primary care. Running a smaller practice, as I do, has inherent rewards and challenges. There is literature on both sides of the Atlantic that patients prefer small practices. Lately, consol…
In Dr. Suneel Dhand’s article, “We can do a better job with hospital discharge paperwork,” he advocates for physicians to do a better job at creating discharge instructions that are more appealing and easier for patients to understand. After all, coher…
My son, Luke, was born 18 months ago with myelomeningocele, the most severe form of spina bifida. Luke and our family have faced many challenges: premature birth at 26 weeks due to complications after in utero surgery for spina bifida; a 171-day stay i…
While riding shotgun in the family minivan on the way home from a fall break water park trip, I received the following text message: I thought of you today! One of the residents here had done a great job with a complex (and really sad) labor and delive…
At the age of 17, my younger sister Elisabeth noticed a change in her body — enlargement of the front of her neck. “I just thought I was building muscle from working out,” she innocently rationalized. A series of laboratory tests and imaging followed a…
