On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to uphold Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act and 5–4 to overrule Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The political temperature was already heightened because Politico released a leaked draft o…
Category: Policy
These are the women who are being told they are not a priority
There are situations where I have told a patient they had no options: a cancer recurrence not responding to any treatment, detecting no heartbeat in a 37-week pregnancy, or telling someone their family member coded and didn’t survive. The worst part of…
Roe v. Wade: Share our experience and be part of the solution
Although this is a politically charged topic in our space in medicine, this isn’t political. For many of us, it’s doing our job — taking care of a patient’s mental and physical health. Making sure they are safe and doing no harm…
Physicians and patients are now pawns in a political game
This morning I had a migraine. I should have known it was coming. I now have complex migraines and was having word-finding difficulty yesterday, which is a harbinger for me. How could I have known that my soul had known before my mind had, that it had …
Treating mental illness will not stop mass shootings
Since the mass shooting in Uvalde, TX, rapidly after that in Buffalo, NY, I have read and heard several simplistic public media pieces suggesting easy means of preventing these acts. They unanimously indicated that mass shooters (MS), especially those …
Government Drug Price Negotiations Offer A False Promise
These “negotiations” are just price controls in disguise. As such, they’d decimate medical innovation and deprive patients of access to lifesaving medications.
As cancer patients wait, states play favorites
Cancer patients soon will have new treatment options in Connecticut. Health care providers recently received regulatory approval for a joint venture that will allow them to open the state’s first proton therapy center. The lifesaving technology, …
The forgotten crisis: a shortage of geriatric doctors in the U.S.
The scarcity of geriatricians in the United States is a severe problem in the public health sphere due to the increased number of older adults and the lack of health care professionals who specialize in this demographic. Approximately 7,000 geriatricia…
Why the baby formula shortage happened
By the end of April 2022, nearly 40 percent of the country’s baby formula ran out of stock, leading to a major baby formula shortage in the United States. The plummeting availability of baby formula has left parents and caregivers anxious as they…
Medical advances can often stir up ethical issues
An excerpt from Pluck: Lessons We Learned for Improving Healthcare and the World, published by Silicon Valley Press. We met Joseph S. Murtaugh, our new chief at the National Institutes of Health, for the first time on July 3, 1967. He sat behind his de…
