An excerpt from Man’s 4th Best Hospital, Now available in paperback from Penguin/Berkley. And in the Fat Man Clinic, what about billing? We would do it ourselves on our screens. Using HEAL, the EHR or Electronic ‘Health’ Record system that BUDDIES had …
“As our office begins to return to pre-COVID operations, it has been uplifting to have a relative sense of normalcy, even though morale seems to be reduced. It is difficult to promote team building and improve morale when everyone has to maintain…
We sit silently on this precipice—my family, my friends, my colleagues. Time spins. Momentum is building. It is a tidal wave slowly moving towards us. We are fixed in its path of raging destruction. It is our enemy, not each other. Each tick on th…
Unprecedented. How many times have we heard that word? Yet, here we balance between the life we knew and the life we long for with the deep, frightening chasm of the unknown strikingly in between. 2020 has not only been one for the history books; it ha…
As a first-year medical student, the transition to an online curriculum has posed a unique set of challenges. I am often asked, “How exactly can you become a doctor without having seen a patient, without having put a stethoscope on another human being?…
November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month, a time when many people in my profession shine a spotlight on the dangers of taking lung health for granted. This year, few need the reminder. COVID-19 is deadly, contagious, and upending life as we know it. It …
I have a video visit in the pulmonary clinic with one of my favorite patients. I ask her how she’s doing and wave to her husband sitting in the background of the living room where she is set up. Deborah says, “We’re good. We’re healthy. We are staying …
“The duty of physician officials in the government exceeds that of other officials. As physicians, they have a unique moral obligation to do more than protect the constitution from enemies, foreign and domestic. They have a duty to be unambiguous…
If you’re in health care, chances are you’ve heard one of these statements: “Masking doesn’t work.” “We’re all going to get COVID, so why mask?” Another is “COVID is just like the flu.” Or you’ve even heard, “Those people who died of COVID would have …
Cardiologists with national reputations were available at a hospital just an hour away. I had connections there and could get what I was sure would be better care for my mother than she would receive in the small hospital where she had been taken follo…
