As painfully revealed by the coronavirus pandemic, the American health care system is ailing, plagued by the inefficiencies and greed of big business and for-profit medicine. It is not unlike the virus, attacking vital organs one by one until the who…
After all the hours spent in HIPAA training over the years, physicians and other health care workers might think of HIPAA as a powerful regulation. It’s true that HIPAA does require health care workers to follow a number of rules, with pretty har…
Maybe dogs aren’t the only ones drinking water from a toilet bowl. In the United States, we have easy access to clean water. We use culinary water to do our dishes, bathe, wash our cars, and even fill our toilets. Most Americans don’t ever …
The first time I saw a preceptor use the American College of Cardiology’s atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (mercifully, ASCVD) risk calculator, I was hooked. As a first-year medical student, data nerd, and aspiring primary care provider, I …
Banning facility fees may seem like a straightforward way to reduce patients’ medical bills. But it will do so by killing off clinics—and thereby curtailing patient access to care.
“Hispanic community makes up more than half of coronavirus cases in Southwest Michigan county” was the headline in the newspaper that caught my eye in August 2020 – that infamous year that the nation went into lockdown to prevent the spread…
In a grocery store recently, a friend’s young child gave a big hug to a brightly colored, meter-high plastic cartoon mascot for a well-known candy brand standing at the end of an aisle surrounded by many bags of the candy on sale. “Aww, tha…
In health care, as in life, people devote a lot of time and attention to the way things should be. They’d be better off focusing on what actually could be. As an example, 57% to 70% of American voters believe our nation “should” adopt…
One early evening in June, we sat in the second row of a Health Sciences Building classroom with 79 other students enrolled in the Summer Medical and Dental Education Program (SMDEP). We were excited to hear a guest lecture from a program alumnus, a cl…
As the spring planting season approaches, seven farmers from my home state of Illinois traveled to Washington, DC to participate in the “Farmers for Climate Action” rally. Farmers sought meetings with lawmakers, including Illinois Sen. Dick…
