After being kept up all night responding to pages, I was still half-asleep walking into Mr. Jenkins’ room for what I thought would be a routine early morning admission for new-onset seizures. From scanning through the electronic medical record, I was n…
Physician reimbursement increasingly depends upon measures of health care quality. Physicians who fall short on quality measures now face financial penalties. But it might be quality measures, themselves, that are falling short, according to a study co…
“It’s maddening to see the differences in health outcomes between the rich and the poor. Even more unsettling is reflecting upon the psychological pain accumulated when living in a fad-obsessed materialistic comparison-creating society, the postp…
A few weeks ago, I became a full professor of medicine. The grand moment happened 28 years after graduating from medical school. The week after the promotion letter, my daughter’s MCAT results were in, and she was hitting submit on medical school…
Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) targets older ethnic and racial minorities with lethal precision, establishing irrefutable evidence that inequality kills. Nearly one-third of those who have died from COVID are Black, while Blacks represent about 14% of th…
When we think about holistic medicine, many assume that it requires human-to-human touch points and, therefore, doesn’t lend itself well to technology and innovations such as artificial intelligence. In fact, holistic medicine and whole-person care adv…
I have noticed several articles describing how antibiotic development has bankrupted some pharmaceutical companies because there isn’t enough potential profit in a ten-day course to treat multi-resistant superbug infections. Chronic disease treatments,…
“All of our patients, but especially our most vulnerable Spanish-speaking patients, need to hear concrete, meaningful, and practical instructions on how to care for each other when they live in large multi-generational families, and positive stor…
“I live and die by waveforms and not just a snippet. I need to see the entire waveform and what led to an event to determine an intervention or root cause.” The intensive care specialist told me this with desperation in his voice. He’s the one who has…
As a physician epidemiologist and former public health official, I find myself confused by people’s perceptions of risk related to coronavirus, particularly as we struggle to reopen our economy amidst a surge of cases. I’ll meet an older ad…
