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…
Category: KevinMD
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…
How COVID-19 will close pediatric practices
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our lives upside down. It has wreaked havoc on the economy, leaving many jobless, and many industries questioning where their future lies. In my view, it has brought the weak infrastructure of the U.S. health care sys…
Nurses do not get paid extra for being pharmacists
An excerpt from Nurses are Nuts. The pharmacy department plays a vital role in hospitals. They prepare and dispense medications. Sometimes the pharmacist will receive an order from the doctor on a med whose written dosage he is not sure of. In some cas…
Has your physician persona crowded out other aspects of yourself?
Imagine you went to a heavy metal concert with me, and whenever we met someone new, I introduced myself in this way: “Hi, my name is Dr. Yoo.” Your immediate reaction would probably be, “That was irrelevant! (or strange, or funny).” And you’d be right….
Scientists predicted remdesivir’s success with a simulation. Here’s how.
In 2002 pro baseball manager Billy Beane accomplished the impossible. He took the Oakland Athletics, a low-budget team comprised of unknown baseball players to the playoffs. The story’s magic is that he was able to compete with the Goliaths of the base…
A reflection on a man’s life before dissection
Almost immediately, the heat from all of us “freshly minted M1s” dissipated, as did the smiles and excitement on everyone’s faces. The frigid temperature, mimicked the morbidity and mortality interlaced in the air. 38 metal containers. Each carrying th…
How to be a better doctor? Stop being their doctor.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought with it a slew of challenges that were previously unimaginable for many of us. Social isolation, separation from beloved family members, the daily struggle to juggle work, parenting, and teaching in times of economic a…
From frontlines to sidelined: a resident’s experience on staying positive
On a gorgeous day in early March, I set out on my usual morning commute to clinic. The recent rain had turned the mountains green, there was some fresh snow atop Mount Baldy in the usually dry Inland Empire of Southern California, and the Lakers had ju…
