May 2016, Kijabe, Kenya I arrived in casualty (the emergency department) to see a minimally responsive Kenyan boy with a body wasted from malnutrition. His mother stood at the bedside cradling his head, her eyes full of fear. His parents had traveled f…
There has been a profound deterioration in the education of our medical students. I only make this contention after having taught over a hundred medical students across five continents, often one-on-one and for extended periods. Although the majority o…
Among modern industrialized nations, only the United States endures the current public health epidemic of firearm-assisted injury and death. In 2017, nearly 40,000 people were shot to death in the U.S., while proponents of the Second Amendment continue…
My dad flew to California in the spring to meet his grandson, who was about five months old at the time. He wasn’t that interested in baby care. He mostly wanted to sight-see and spend the evenings watching TV. One weekday morning, he ventured out on a…
Late one evening, I received a text from my oldest daughter. “What in medicine, that we do now, will we think is barbaric in 50 years?” Wow. They play more provocative bar games now than they played when I was in my 20s. I promptly texted back my knee-…
“Does a rock float on water?” I asked the haggard woman lying in the ICU bed. I was an intern, in the first rotation of my medical residency, and Mrs. Jones had been my ICU team’s patient for the past week. Over that time, she’d…
I am just another average physician. It wasn’t my first return from maternity leave, but this busy ED shift wasn’t going well. I kept putting off breast-pumping to complete “just one more thing.” Then my son’s school secretary called. I had told our na…
The Trump administration has proposed that insurance plans providing drug coverage to Medicare beneficiaries will no longer be forced to cover six hitherto “protected” drug classes. The classes — which include drugs for psychiatric conditio…
1. Murphy’s Law as it applies to the ER: If something can go bad, it will do so in a hurry. If it can’t possibly go bad, it will still find a way. 2. Clock’s First Rule: All the patients will crash at the same time. Usually when the computer system goe…
For some reason, social media does a good job with sculpting our lives into perfectly organized displays that are available to look at during every breathing second of our lives thanks to the revolutionary invention called the smartphone. I look at pic…
