An excerpt from A Leader’s Guide to Giving a Memorable Speech: How to Deliver a Message and Captivate an Audience. “The most powerful words in English are ‘tell me a story.’” —Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides and The Gr…
Category: KevinMD
How a sojourn atop a mountain in Vietnam changed my life forever
As the gentle rumbles of thunder became increasingly sonorous, the sharp crackles of lightning casting out the darkness of night, striking like the angry whips from a scorned martinet, and the torrential rain now cascading down from our awning like loo…
I graduated medical school while sitting in the parking lot
My phone chimed. I received an email stating that rotations were canceled, so I had effectively graduated medical school while sitting in the parking lot of my local grocery store. It felt like a natural end to an isolating day. That morning, the cherr…
A physician’s experience of bigotry in medicine
“So now you think I have all these implicit biases, don’t you?” My Caucasian attending rolls his chair towards me. The words are already out of his mouth. And now I’m acutely aware, once again, that I’m African-American, gay, and in a position of hiera…
Telemedicine in COVID-19: Disparities still exist
An increasing number of institutions are relying on telemedicine to continue delivering care to patients in lieu of typical outpatient visits in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Telemedicine has been lauded as a potential equalizer in health care acc…
When this pandemic ends, I hope we will all better appreciate these kitchen table relationships
One of my favorite TV characters is Cliff Clavin, the know-it-all mailman on the TV show Cheers. I really like his quirky sense of humor and affection for interesting but useless facts. When I was in medical school and transcribed class notes to make …
Prioritize the health of children during the pandemic
Where are the kids? What are they doing? Are they learning anything? My stomach grows heavy, and my throat clogs. Are they eating? Are they safe? Good Lord, I hope that they are safe. As a pediatrician and as a mother of two, I regularly scan news arti…
COVID-19 blurs the line between physician and patient
The unspoken culture in medicine has been that to maintain objective professionalism – some measure of distance is encouraged between the clinician and the patient. From anatomy lab, students are encouraged to forget patients as fellow human bein…
COVID-19? We are not even ready for a hurricane.
The hurricane made landfall during the early morning hours. When I woke up, all I saw was devastation. Highway 288 transformed into a lake. The bayou running underneath was completely flooded with water spilling into the roads. The park, a place where …
The social determinants of health during the COVID-19 pandemic
As an academic internist, over the past five years, I’ve been hearing more and more about social determinants of health. I have read countless journal articles comparing health outcomes; I’ve attended grand rounds on the subject; recently, our electro…
