I came back from a family vacation to Italy one day before the first case of novel coronavirus was reported there. Two days later, the CDC issued a Level 3 travel warning for visitors to Italy. Eight days later, and six days after returning to work, …
COVID-19 is here, and it isn’t going away. The SARS-CoV2 virus, and the disease it causes, has entered the ecosystem of human pathogens and is running up numbers that make it appear to be heading into the realm of the pandemic. Let’s look a…
Seven years ago, I vividly recalled a patient saying, “It needs to be as easy to schedule with you as OpenTable.” For most health care systems, this request is now a reality. Yet, how far has the restaurant metaphor moved into patient expec…
“The weak would never enter the kingdom of love.” ― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera As the medical community grapples to come up with an appropriate response and protect our patients from this latest pandemic, I cannot help but wo…
There is constant tension to remain on-time working in a primary care clinic, seeing patients every twenty minutes back-to-back. It takes an incredible ability for the front desk staff, medical assistants, and the physician to be able to keep this flo…
With the escalating pressures on hospitals, health care facilities, and practitioners to be cost-effective, it is increasingly difficult to justify spending money on education and training. Education and training are expensive when adding together the …
“So, the next step in the history taking process is to define the pain. You start this by asking for site, with questions like, “Where are you experiencing the pain? Can you pinpoint the site or is it more general? Does the pain radiate (spread anywher…
I am a 57-year-old female physician, and I remember an incident that involved a cardiologist on the other end of the phone, roughly fifteen years ago. I had recently started work as a hospitalist, and the cardiologist and I had never met. He clearly di…
1. Take it easy. The worst part of all this is the fear. More people die from the flu, car accidents, or guns. As of Saturday, March 7th, 19 Americans had died from COVID-19, compared to 1,177 every week from the flu, 746 from car crashes, and 294 from…
An excerpt from Looking Within: Understanding Ourselves through Human Imaging. It started as a routine weekend shift, reading studies on patients in the hospital and the emergency department, when the phone rang. Jessie, the nuclear medicine technologi…
