It was a common enough reason for someone to have a CT scan. The order read, “Abdominal pain, colon cancer resected in January.” It was now March, only two months post-surgery. Yet the patient’s CT scan showed a number of large masses in the liver, con…
I have been working on gun violence prevention for the past two years. After the Las Vegas shooting, I worked with a fellow medical student to create a course teaching medical students about gun violence and how it relates to medicine. We taught future…
If Rudolph Virchow’s observation that “medicine is a social science and politics is nothing but medicine writ large” is true, then medicine is bias writ large because politics is nothing but bias on steroids. Virchow’s maxim is now adopted by medical j…
Over the past few summers, I’ve been noticing that when it came to swimming in the deep end of the pool, I was fearful. Gone was the fearlessness of my youth, when I’d venture out, take risks and somehow just know I’d make it back to the shallow end wh…
When a mental health clinic, online referral service, or private practice offers “evidence-based” psychotherapy, that certainly sounds like a selling point. It suggests solid science supports the therapy offered — and that competing services lac…
The money was so good in the beginning, and it seemed it might gush forever, right through tiny country hospitals in Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and into the coffers of companies controlled by Jorge A. Perez, his family, and business partners. It was…
When a patient comes to see me for a migraine headache, I know that they will leave feeling 100 percent better. They will finally be rid of that pounding, nauseating pain in their head, and they will be happy. And that makes me happy. Doctors derive gr…
“You’re 27-and-a-half weeks pregnant.” As I lay on the exam table, time froze. How can this be? I wondered dazedly. I’m a second-year medical student. I’ve just completed a course in female reproduction and endocrinology. …
Early into my career as an emergency physician, I was seated in the department with a colleague when I inquired about one of our co-workers I had not seen in a while. “Oh, she’s on the mommy track,” my colleague said and picked up ano…
The sound of a clock, hung haphazardly on a colorless cold wall, ticks repetitively — tick, tick, tick. Time continues to pass as my appointment scheduled for three hours ago seems like it will never come. I scheduled this appointment three month…
