Category: KevinMD

I’ve been on a ventilator before, so I’d like to sit this pandemic out

I have bled out during emergency surgery and been revived by the expert trauma and transplant team who raced into my operating room. I have had liter upon liter of donated blood transfused into my grey lifeless body. I survived months on a ventilator i…

The worst-case scenario for our hospitals in a severe pandemic

I wish that I didn’t have the experience of working 34 years as a nurse. I know the big picture in a hospital. A recent article stated that the Twin Cities, where I live, has 500 ICU beds, 450 ventilators. As of last Friday, those were 95 percent…

What’s to blame for the obesity epidemic?

Obesity is a topic that literally hits home for me.  For the past two years, the website WalletHub has voted the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission TX metroplex as the “fattest city in America.”  As a health care provider, this is deeply disturbing because it pu…

Coronavirus can be controlled, but we must embrace sacrifice

In the midst of this coronavirus pandemic, a friend of mine relayed a troubling story to me recently. My friend is a dermatologist who is 9-months pregnant, living and working in a county with no known community spread of the novel coronavirus. After s…

I’m grateful my father never lived to see the COVID-19 outbreak

My dad was a baseball enthusiast and a connoisseur of fried calamari and dark chocolate.  He had a genius-level IQ and knew the answers to obscure Jeopardy questions.  He would beat you at any trivia game.  He was an avid reader, typically reading at l…

The opioid crisis is real. But so is pain.

“I’m not impressed with his pain.” “I only give Norco if I see a bone sticking out.” “She says her pain is a 10/10 but …” On any given shift in the emergency room, I hear some version of these said by res…

Frontline clinicians deserve hazard pay

These are interesting times.  Our schools are shut down.  Transportation halted.  Businesses shuttered.  Public spaces abandoned.  Cities locked down.  Stock markets crashing.  It is the greatest disruption to life we have faced since 9/11, and this wi…

Innovation in the time of COVID-19

Necessity is the mother of invention, and in no time is invention more necessary than during a global pandemic.  Starting with the drive-through testing clinics pioneered overseas that spread to the United States (big shout-out to the University of Was…

7 ideas for an alternative Match Day

As a cardiologist, a mom of three school-aged kids, a physician’s wife, and associate dean of student affairs, I am acutely aware of how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our communities. In this time of constant change and concern, it is important to…

Independent practice and the lost art of touch

I am a geriatric psychiatrist and am an osteopathic physician. The art of touch is a major part of my practice. I am the medical director of an inpatient geriatric facility. The patients that I see on the unit are typically suffering from dementia with…