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Persons with intellectual disabilities forgotten in the COVID-19 pandemic

Conditions and Diseases

April 20, 2020

I am hiding out in our lovely spacious house in the woods with my husband, hoping that COVID-19 will not find us. Both of us are in the “at-risk” category as we are both in our 70s. We are both New Yorkers, but we are upstate because our 50-year-old daughter lives in a community here.

Our daughter has a rare genetic condition that has severely limited her …

Unmasked: The untold story behind 1,000+ train rides in Japan and face masks

Jay Wong

Conditions and Diseases

April 20, 2020

If you are ever lucky enough to find yourself jam-packed like a sardine to the point of being unable to take in a deep breath on a train in Tokyo during peak rush-hour traffic, a truly fascinating sight to behold awaits you.

Inside, not only would you be privy to a homogenous landscape of salarymen sporting natty business attire and clutching shiny briefcases, and countless women all decked-out with the latest …

The harsh reality of social distancing in rural America

Meera Nagarajan

Health Policy

April 19, 2020

“They stole my shoes!” she told me with tears streaming down her face. It was 30 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and the woman in front of me at the food pantry only had the clothes on her back, walking around town barefoot.

In addition to taking her shoes, most of her items set up around her tent located in the Walmart parking lot had been stolen. She was here at the food …

The hidden adverse effects of COVID-19 on physician caregivers

Rebecca Elia, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 19, 2020

As caregivers, our #1 role is protection — protecting our children, our elderly parents, our patients, even our staff and colleagues. Notice how I didn’t mention protecting ourselves? This is off-radar for most caregivers until they have no choice, until their own survival is threatened. The same is true for physicians. Self-protection is not a thought that commonly enters our minds.

COVID-19 places physician caregivers in the impossible position of sacrificing …

Being a pregnant medical trainee just got more complicated in the COVID-19 era

Anonymous

Conditions and Diseases

April 19, 2020

As a cardiology fellow in a busy New York City hospital, my life has snowballed into chaos. Just last week, I was a pregnant doctor completing her second trimester, waddling down the halls of the hospital with an echocardiogram machine in tow, taking care of sick cardiac patients. Now a viral pandemic has invaded all remnants of this prior life.

Patients pour into intensive care units with coronavirus. Colleagues serve on …

Human values in the age of COVID-19

Charles E. Binkley, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 19, 2020

COVID-19 has brought out the best in people, and also the worst.

Daily on social media or in the news, I read heartwarming examples of generosity and kindness that challenge me to be a better person. The doctors, nurses, therapists, and chaplains who are selflessly risking their lives, sometimes with substandard personal protective equipment (PPE), rekindles in me the passion for patient care that brought me to medicine in the first …

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Human values in the age of COVID-19

How we respond to COVID-19 can serve us well for the rest of our lives

Johnathan Yao, MD, MPH

Conditions and Diseases

April 19, 2020

Many of the patients whom I met during my oncology rotation felt hopeful for a cure. They imagined how once their cancer went into remission, they could go back to their normal lives as they once were.

I was struck then when one patient, a 72-year-old male Mr. G, shared with me a different attitude towards his cancer. His father, his mother, and his sister had all died from cancer. He …

Approach the gun violence epidemic like we do with coronavirus

Charles Nozicka, DO

Health Policy

April 19, 2020

Among industrialized nations, only the United States endures the current public health epidemic of firearm-assisted injury and death. In 2018, nearly 40,000 people were shot to death in the U.S., while proponents of the Second Amendment continue to protect it at all costs — fighting even common-sense measures such as limiting access to felons and the mentally ill. On both sides of this debate, opinions are lobbed as facts; these …

What 3 years of sitting on Japanese toilets taught me

Jay Wong

Conditions and Diseases

April 19, 2020

The first time I stepped foot in Japan was the summer of 2014. I was a wide-eyed, overzealous sophomore at Yale, all packed and ready to embark on a 2-month journey to Tokyo for a Japanese study abroad program that I only enrolled in so that my language proficiency would be tolerable enough to get my college crush at the time, who is of Japanese descent, to like me.

Pathetic, I …

Beyond volunteering to help with COVID-19 relief, medical students must also advocate for a change to our health care system

Amelia Dmowska

Health Policy

April 18, 2020

As if it were a typical Monday afternoon, my anatomy instructor asked my medical school classmates to lean in a little closer. “Do you see the left gastric artery?” He asked, as he zoomed in on a 3D online visualization of a stomach. Instead of leaning over the body of a donor, we leaned closer to our computer screens.

Over the past few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the format of …

7 tips for telehealth during COVID-19

David L. Feldman, MD, MBA

Conditions and Diseases

April 18, 2020

Telehealth has come into focus during the COVID-19 pandemic as physicians face an immediate need to reduce exposure by providing care—or at least triage—remotely when appropriate.

Under usual circumstances, telemedicine is comparatively low risk. That said, telemedicine does bring specific risks to patient safety and physician/practice liability. Minimizing those risks calls for adapting daily practice routines around informed consent, documentation, and other standard components of a patient encounter, as well as …

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7 tips for telehealth during COVID-19

Use COVID-19 to get your life back

Karyn P. Grant

Conditions and Diseases

April 18, 2020

It’s time for some good news and hope about life during and after COVID-19.

You may be frantically racing from room to room in your house, and from role to role to keep everything together during this unprecedented time.

You’re a doctor, parent, teacher, partner, chef, housekeeper, and business owner, to name just a few.

Meanwhile, you know that your staff is relaxing at home, catching up on Netflix series, baking cookies, and …

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Use COVID-19 to get your life back

Blowing the whistle on health care fraud: the rewards and protections of doing the right thing

Joseph Gentile, JD

Conditions and Diseases

April 18, 2020

Fraud in the health care industry is a fact of life. In 2016 alone, the federal government estimated that improper payments by Medicare and Medicaid totaled about $95 billion. And that’s only a single year’s amount for just two of the government’s many health care programs. With an aging population, increased health care spending, the passage of the CARES Act, and the government’s multi-trillion-dollar effort to mitigate the health and …

COVID-19: Why are blacks in America are more likely to die?

Osmund Agbo, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 18, 2020

“We are all in this crisis together, but we are not all experiencing this crisis in the same way.”

That was how Chicago mayor, Lori Lightfoot described the jarring data from Chicago’s public health agency that showed black residents accounted for 72 percent of COVID-19 deaths in a city whose black population make up only 30 percent.

From Chicago to New Orleans, Detroit to Milwaukee, cities with large African-American populations are fast …

Love in the time of COVID-19

Sarah E. Stumbar, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 18, 2020

COVID-19 changes everything — even, or especially, love. It demands that we love differently and in new ways. For me, this is what #loveinthetimeofcovid19 looks like.

My husband, Lunan, and I are both doctors. Lunan, a urologist, is completing his final year of training in New York City, and I am a family-physician educator at a medical school in Miami.

We are living separately this year — one of the many sacrifices …

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Love in the time of COVID-19

When COVID-19 becomes blinding to other conditions

Amber Deptola, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 17, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has incited the necessary fear amongst the public and health care workers. This fear is a positive driver of social distancing and other precautionary measures that assist in protecting health care workers and patients. However, when this fear becomes blinding, patients may be more harmed than they are helped. Last week, I had a patient with a likely stroke refuse to go to the hospital due to …

How COVID-19 changed our fellowship interview process for the better

Aparajit Naram, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 17, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic is fundamentally changing medical practice across the country by allowing telemedicine reimbursement, where it was previously limited, and by leveraging video conferencing technology to conduct business and educational meetings in order to comply with social distancing guidance. Necessity is resulting in innovative ways to interact with patients, colleagues, and now with prospective trainees as residency and fellowship interview season begins. While in-person interviews are a trademark of …

Residents are being sent to fight a war with no protection, no power, and no voice

Constance Chace, MD, MPH, Supraja Thota, MD, and Milla Kviatkovsky, DO, MPH

Conditions and Diseases

April 17, 2020

Three resident physicians died last week from COVID-19 and are the first known deaths of medical trainees in the United States. Dr. Chris Firlit, a 37-year-old oral surgery resident from Detroit, died from complications of COVID-19. He leaves behind his wife Sylvie and three children, Alexander, Viktor, and Katerina. Sadly, we know residents like Dr. Firlit will not be the only ones to lose their lives in this pandemic. Unbeknown …

To volunteer or to stay home? A medical student’s daily dilemma during COVID-19.

Justin Koceja

Conditions and Diseases

April 17, 2020

Wake up. Turn the coffee pot on. Stretch. Read about the latest news. Over the past several years, this same sequence of events has served as the start to my day, and it has continued to be my routine over the past few weeks. However, this early morning routine has been the only thing in my life that has remained “routine” since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

As a third-year medical student …

Turning to prayer during the pandemic

Anna Delamerced

Conditions and Diseases

April 17, 2020

Photos of health care providers in prayerful stances are being shared on the web. From nurses on helipads at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, to ER teams at Jackson South Medical Center, people have been photographed on their knees, arms outstretched, and heads bowed. In Atlanta, doctors and nurses went up to the roof of Cartersville Hospital to join …

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Turning to prayer during the pandemic

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