In the coronavirus era, I go most days to our neighborhood McDonald’s, where I purchase a cup of coffee and take it outside to a patio area where I sit and eat peanut butter crackers which I carry with me.
Today as I stood in a short line inside the facility, with persons standing the approved distance from one another, of course, an older man came up behind me and tapped …
Going to McDonald’s in the coronavirus era
I recited the Hippocratic Oath many years ago as I donned my new white coat and made a commitment to serve humanity through the practice of medicine. That zeal to help others continued through a vigorous residency and fellowship. As life was put on hold to pursue that dream of becoming a doctor, the brakes were lifted after training as I got married and had two children. Soon, instead of …
The Hippocratic Oath versus my oath as a mother
With the public health emergency of COVID-19, there has been a renewed call to improve emergency preparedness among physicians. Varied proposals have arisen for how to improve medical education in anticipation of future disasters. While many of these proposals are reasonable, a problematic train of thought has also emerged: seeking to improve pandemic education at the cost of removing existing education on the social factors surrounding …
Pandemic lessons: Social justice is not disposable medical school curriculum
Webster’s Dictionary defines trauma as a “disordered psychic or behavioral state resulting from severe emotional stress.”
An article in MarketWatch describes the reality of a doctor after being on the frontlines in Wuhan for two months:
Li is mentally and psychologically at a loss for what to do next. He can’t sleep or eat, he often feels dazed, and sometimes, seemingly out of nowhere, he weeps.
Nurses have described …
What happens to health care workers after the coronavirus?
It was the middle of March when I came back to my work shift. I got the news my floor would be COVID-19 floor that meant all patients coming to the ER with COVID-19 symptoms would be placed solely under my supervision.
I was all ready for it — at least I knew the challenges I was going to face.
The number of patients getting admitted to rule out COVID-19 kept on …
What it’s like to be a frontline physician with COVID-19 patient
As resident physicians, now is not the time to be quiet. We must stand up for ourselves in the face of this life-threatening virus. Our health is vital to preserving the standards set before us in providing exceptional medical care to future generations. In the wake of the tragic deaths of a few of our colleagues – now it is more important than ever to speak your voice and demand …
As resident physicians, now is not the time to be quiet
As we face this pandemic head-on, there is another problem we cannot afford to lose sight of, the problem of overweight and obesity. Nearly 70 percent of the people in the USA suffer from either overweight or obesity. The stress this pandemic is putting on us as individuals and as a society is unprecedented.
While people are grappling with the current threat of coronavirus, the constant fear of getting infected exponentially …
Mindfulness can help you not make the stress of COVID-19 worse.
I’ll start with the easiest way to practice mindfulness; you need not even be meditating. Stop whatever you’re doing and shift your attention to the physical sensation of three or four breaths as they come in and go out of your body.
That’s basic mindfulness practice.
For me, the most valuable aspect of doing this is that pausing to follow my breath …
2 mindfulness practices to help cope with COVID-19
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 …
Persons with intellectual disabilities forgotten in the COVID-19 pandemic
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 …
Unmasked: The untold story behind 1,000+ train rides in Japan and face masks
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 …
The hidden adverse effects of COVID-19 on physician caregivers
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 …
Being a pregnant medical trainee just got more complicated in the COVID-19 era
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 …
Human values in the age of COVID-19
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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 …
How we respond to COVID-19 can serve us well for the rest of our lives
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 …
What 3 years of sitting on Japanese toilets taught me
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 …
7 tips for telehealth during COVID-19
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 …
Use COVID-19 to get your life back
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 …
Blowing the whistle on health care fraud: the rewards and protections of doing the right thing
“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 …
COVID-19: Why are blacks in America are more likely to die?
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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