I sat knee-to-knee with a nurse practitioner at a school-based clinic in rural Ohio. Choking back tears, she described a patient she couldn’t get out of her head: a middle-school girl, accompanied by her mother and a social worker. Just days prior, the…
As a physician who has spent his career taking care of people with HIV/AIDS, cancer and various blood disorders, this is an amazing time to be working in these overlapping fields of medicine. I began my training when roughly half the people diagnosed w…
Patient access to care is a high priority for all neurosurgeons. Unfortunately, many of our practices are thwarted in these efforts from unwarranted insurance denials. Know, you are not alone. Take this common scenario: When Ms. Mary Smith (not the pat…
There was a point in my life when the words “climate change” would recall pictures of polar bears marooned on precarious chunks of ice, bobbing aimlessly in some foreign landscape of tundra and sea. While tragic, the environmental drama playing out at …
Among modern industrialized nations, only the United States endures the current public health epidemic of firearm-assisted injury and death. In 2017, nearly 40,000 people were shot to death in the U.S., while proponents of the Second Amendment continue…
The Trump administration has proposed that insurance plans providing drug coverage to Medicare beneficiaries will no longer be forced to cover six hitherto “protected” drug classes. The classes — which include drugs for psychiatric conditio…
In the United States, 25 million adult women are insured by their state Medicaid program. Medicaid covers 60 percent of all births in the United States as per federal law, and states must cover all pregnancy-related services for pregnant women with inc…
Of late, doctor/friends on social media have taken to reposting news articles detailing the horrors taking place in other nations because of the evil scourge known as socialized medicine. In fact, the two words, alone or together, just don’t carry anyt…
How can we forget John Bender from The Breakfast Club? How can we forget his tousled wave of chestnut hair, cutoff lumberjack shirt, emanating cool with a cigarette perpetually in hand? In light of the 78 percent rise in e-cigarette use by high school …
Many of us working in the “Gun Sense” field – that is, finding a middle ground position to advance firearm safety and reduce preventable injury in our patients – had an “a-ha” moment that led us to toil in these fields. Mine was on Nov. 2, 1981, when m…
