Many health care facilities are enacting policies during this time of COVID-19 that restrict the number of people attending appointments in person. Family care providers are asked to wait outside or drop off the patient for their appointment and come back to pick them up later.
There are, of course, exceptions made for those receiving a new diagnosis or when the …
Do COVID restrictions in the office negatively affect patients?
I recently finished my geriatric psychiatry rotation. As a medical student and aspiring psychiatrist, I had the opportunity to participate in the care of those suffering from acute psychosis, depression, bipolar disorder, depression, and more — many of whom were dealing with suicidal ideation. While an engaging experience, I am worried. The climate crisis puts these patients at great risk.
I’m a novice to climate advocacy. I’ve long considered myself to be someone …
Dear medical community, it’s time to engage in the climate movement
Vote. These four letters reflect one of the most powerful actions in human history – the act of choosing who represents you and your beliefs. As an immigrant child and naturalized citizen, I was not born with the right to vote in the United States of America. Yet, I remember the day I first voted. As I walked into the polling site, I remembered how my grandmother in India offered …
Physicians must exercise their right to vote
We wrote this blog on National Physician Suicide Awareness Day. As a chapter wellness champion for the American College of Physicians, I have spent the past few months planning on what this September should entail. From Webinars to Facebook pages to tweets, I’ve included anything that I could to let my friends and colleagues know that they are not alone. There is a way out: we just have to keep …
National Physician Suicide Awareness Day: Let’s try to dig a little deeper for more love
Being humane makes you a hero.
It is a privilege to serve.
Be the voice, for those without!
Six words. One Story. These are examples from the My Six-Word Story Project, an innovative activity that supports the psycho-social well-being and emotional resilience of our healthcare professionals. My Six-Word Story has the power to reconnect us to our purpose and connect us as a community.
“It’s your reaction to adversity, not adversity itself that determines …
Why everyone needs a six-word story
The patient arrived in cardiac arrest. He had been brought to our emergency department in the middle of the night. Although he had a significant cardiac history, including bypass surgery, he was only in his late 40s. His transport from his house to our department had been less than 10 minutes, and the pre-hospital team had done an excellent job of intubating this patient and establishing an IV to begin …
Letting a loved one witness resuscitation
Somewhere in Wuhan, China, a bat was eaten — and the world as we knew it was over. (Note to self: Never have your bat below medium, and avoid bat tartare like the plague.)
Kids stayed home. So did their parents. They started talking to each other, instead of watching their phones while rushing from soccer games to ballet rehearsals via McDonald’s.
Sports got suspended, and millions of rabid sports fans remembered …
Patients vs. customers during COVID
Before he was another Black man shot by police, Jacob Blake could have been my patient. In Waterbury, Connecticut, where I practice as an internist, his shooting has left me to consider the health effects of the exposure of violence on his sons, who watched in horror from the back seat of the car as their father was shot eight times in the back by a white officer of the …
The medical profession must address the injustices Black patients suffer
Recently, a neighbor and friend of mine died. After her cancer was diagnosed as incurable, she was referred to hospice care, and family members traveled long distances to spend quality time with her during her last month of life.
Her neighbors in our condo building clamored for slots in her packed social calendar. Two days before her death, she held a socially distanced open house for people lined up six feet …
This is what a good death could be
Academic medicine generally encompasses a tripartite mission of research discovery, clinical innovation, and the next generation of physicians and scientists’ education.
It is the ethics and social justice principles, practices, policies, and innovation that advance research and education in the health sciences, ultimately improving the health and well-being of all.
This is its socially responsible mission. Yet, it seems chief diversity officers, equity practitioners, and scholars everywhere have …
42 ways to advance racial equity in academic medicine
COVID- 19 is a disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is approximately 120 nm in diameter. To put it in non-scientific terms, its physical size may be diminutive, but its impact has been devastating on the entire human race. Who knew that this tiny but mighty virus would hold the world hostage or make the year 2020 historical, to say the least.
Like all of you, I was not prepared …
Beyond the medical lessons learned from COVID
Our understanding of COVID-19 is still evolving, but after observing millions of cases worldwide over the last nine months, we can speak to transmission patterns with a modicum of confidence. SARS-CoV-2 is spread primarily through the air. Contact with contaminated surfaces, by comparison, plays a minuscule role in transmission. Why, then, has every surface with the slightest prospect for human contact become subject to “enhanced cleaning?”
Yes, there are studies reporting …
COVID transmission should not be a touchy subject
I’m writing this piece partly to celebrate the release of my new book, How to Be Sick: Your Pocket Companion, and partly, as always, to try and help readers. I thought I would share the challenges that the book covers, adding some comments as I go. Many of the challenges turn out to apply to the restricted lives all of us are leading in light of …
10 challenges faced by those with chronic pain and illness
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National Physician Suicide Awareness Day was September 17, 2020. Honestly, I hate that this day needs to exist. Prior to COVID, physicians had the highest suicide rate of any profession, and we clearly needed to be having conversations about how we improve care for physicians. Since COVID, the stress placed on physicians has increased exponentially. In hotspots, we’ve felt overwhelmed and demoralized. In the downtime, we’ve had to worry about …
Physician suicide awareness: glimmers of hope for the future
The best part of my job is interviewing residents and watching as gears begin to turn in their minds when I ask:
Designing your life and career in medicine
I am an emergency medicine physician in an inner-city emergency department, and I would like to start by stating a simple truth: coronavirus is not going away any time soon. Cases are climbing in practically every state and show no signs of slowing down. From my personal perspective, things are getting worse. Every day I am treating more and more patients who are ill with COVID-19 …
If you don’t want to wear a mask, come to work with me
If a core goal of our nation is to have the healthiest population possible, then we need to rethink, regroup, and restore our commitment to health practices and processes that are aligned with this mission. We are currently investing our precious social and economic capital into a health care system that is wildly inefficient, too expensive, confusing, and failing most of us. As costs continue to spiral upward, the patient …
This is what a successful health care system looks like
Twenty-five years have passed since I finished my residency, and a lot has changed. Back then, we hand wrote all our notes, and the only time we looked at a computer screen was to obtain laboratory results. Now, residents spend more time in front of a computer screen than at the bedside.
I contend that electronic health records (EHR) are an obstacle to learning the art and practice of medicine during …
I have written, or more accurately ranted, about electronic medical records (EMR) systems throughout this blog. While the systems have clearly improved since their mandatory introduction into the medical universe, they have still not delivered on many of their promises.
Of course, EMR has brought tremendous advantages to the medical profession, and we are all grateful for the technology. But this progress has exacted a cost. Many of them are clumsy …
An EMR frustration that is still torturing us
Care.
I do not believe we have ever heard more about care at a presidential nominating convention than in this year’s Democrat convention. “Patriotism,” “justice,” “bravery,” “strength”? For sure. But “care”? Scarcely a word. Yet we now hear that the role of the president is to “care about and for the people” he governs.
Socrates spoke of the task of a ruler to care for his subjects as the shepherd who cares …
Care is no longer personal. Care is political.
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