Conditions and Diseases

Physicians writing on KevinMD about the diseases they treat and the people who have them: cancer and its screening arguments, pain and the drugs that treat it, diabetes and the obesity argument, mental illness and who gets treated for it, and the decisions at the end of a life. Five maintained records draw on this archive: Cancer: what physicians say, in their own words, Opioids: what physicians and pain patients say, in their own words, End of life: what physicians say, in their own words, Diabetes and obesity: what physicians say, in their own words, and Mental health: what psychiatrists and physicians say, in their own words.

What’s in a disease name, anyway? Everything.

Jay Wong

April 14, 2020

Spanish Flu. Japanese Encephalitis. Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome. West Nile Virus. Wuhan Virus (and lately, the “Chinese Virus” as many have begun calling the pathogen that causes COVID-19: SARS-CoV-2).

What do these names all have in common, you might ask? Well, for one thing, they were constructed not by a strict scientific nomenclature, but by an aspect of the virus or disease that is inextricably linked to a facet of one’s …

How nurses made me a more compassionate and caring person, and a better physician

Andy Lamb, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 14, 2020

I have had the privilege to serve alongside hundreds of nurses in the nearly 40 years since I started medical school. This includes inpatient and outpatient settings and 20 years of leading medical missions around the world. There are five amazing nurses in my family as well. I have learned from every nurse with whom I have served. This has made me a more compassionate, caring, and empathetic person, and …

Combating patient isolation: Breast cancer treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic

Jake R. Erickson and Kirstyn E. Brownson, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 14, 2020

As a health care system, we have united during the COVID-19 public health threat to embrace social distancing and “flatten the curve.” In order to conserve scarce resources and limit viral transmission, we health care providers have canceled elective surgeries, postponed health screenings, and moved patient encounters to online platforms. While we are fighting to save critically ill patients affected by the virus inside the hospital, we are attempting to …

How a physician finds laughter during this dark time

Nancy Yen Shipley, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 14, 2020

As I write this, we are in dark times. Over 23,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus, and there are half a million diagnosed cases – even with testing far from comprehensive. Most cities are on some sort of lockdown. Most of us have become hyperaware of hygiene and personal space in a way that only those thought of as germaphobes have – it’s now the norm. Individuals and businesses …

Health care workers during the COVID-19 crisis: superheroes or human-heroes?

Veda N. Giri, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 14, 2020

This essay is for my colleagues. When I say “colleagues,” I am referring to all health care workers who are currently working on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis or are engaging in patient care at any level. This might be an unconventional essay coming from a doctor, but I wanted to send out my thoughts and heartfelt wishes for the well-being of health care workers during this time. Health …

You’re just the anesthesiology resident

Anonymous

Conditions and Diseases

April 14, 2020

You always knew they didn’t care about you. The administration, I mean. But you knew that going into it. It’s just four years that you have to endure until you can be respected, until you make the big bucks, until you’re treated like a human being. Four years is not that long.

But you knew this going into it. That they didn’t care. You’re just a resident. Now more than ever, …

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You’re just the anesthesiology resident

Cowardice in the face of coronavirus

Jordana Kozupsky, AGNP-BC, ACHPN

Conditions and Diseases

April 14, 2020

When coronavirus exploded, my family was on vacation in Colorado. We played the news nonstop, and it was frightening. I’m a control freak, a planner, and thus my worries were nonstop. What were other hospitals doing to prepare as compared to my own? What were the plans to ration PPE? How was the morale at the place I’d been at almost daily for years?

I was angry, frustrated, and disappointed. Not …

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Cowardice in the face of coronavirus

When the pandemic became real to this physician

Margaret Mou, DO

Conditions and Diseases

April 14, 2020

Everything feels like it’s happening out of a movie, mostly because we’ve all seen it before. Pandemic, Outbreak, even World War Z. It has never felt real, until it became real.

It became real when all of my friends from my pediatrics residency in New York became adult doctors, figuring out how to ventilate a 65 year old on the fly. It became real when my best …

Do viruses infect bones?

Roy A. Meals, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 14, 2020

Viruses typically invade our bodies through an opening. Think gastrointestinal flu, COVID-19, AIDS. Our bones, however, are normally protected from any outside exposure, so they should be safe, right?

The short answer is yes and no. Of course, knowledge is power, and we need both right now, so here is a nuanced answer.

Patients with smallpox frequently complained of bone pain. Epidemics in Prague in 1891-1892, in Boston a decade later, in …

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Do viruses infect bones?

COVID-19 is causing massive disruptions for medical students. It’s also making us better doctors.

J. Reed McGraw

Conditions and Diseases

April 14, 2020

I packed my bags to head home for spring break, excited for a week with family and friends—a rare opportunity to recharge during the first year of medical school. I headed straight to the airport after my neurology exam at the beginning of March, not realizing that the short week at home I had originally planned would turn into months.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a monumental …

The deadly racial disparity of COVID-19

Daniel K. Amponsah, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 14, 2020

There is an old adage within the black community that says, “When White America catches a cold, Black America has pneumonia.” African American patients with COVID-19 are dying at a significantly higher rate compared to other races. These statistics are currently reported within the state of Louisiana and cities of Chicago and Milwaukee. At the time I am writing this, on April 8, 2020, there are only nine states publicizing …

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The deadly racial disparity of COVID-19

The struggle of being a nurse is real

Samantha Hammond, RN

Conditions and Diseases

April 14, 2020

As I struggled my way through nursing school, I never expected my first job as a nurse to feel like this; I was too busy dreaming of the day when I could hold the title of registered nurse.

I never expected to come home crying. I never expected that, at times, I’d mumble the words “I hate my job.” I never expected many of the challenges I face daily— but here …

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The struggle of being a nurse is real

Addressing the social isolation problem one step at a time

Warren Yamashita, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 13, 2020

As chief resident of my rural Hawaii Island Family Medicine Residency program, I look back with our nation upon the past four months that turned our whole world topsy-turvy. At the start of this year, I remember when leaders of organizations, businesses, and churches started sharing their new “2020 visions” for a year of great hope and optimism. Yet none of us could have fully prepared for what was brewing in …

Coping with fear as a physician during a pandemic

Kristin Yates, DO

Conditions and Diseases

April 13, 2020

Throughout my years as a physician, I have had an abundance of moments of fear. Typically, this fear has been related to concern for my patients. A fetal bradycardia requiring an emergency Cesarean section, a postpartum woman hemorrhaging despite all first line medications and procedures, a woman with a ruptured ectopic pregnancy and dropping hemoglobin. The fear that I have felt over the last month has been different. It’s a …

The collective consciousness of COVID-19

Michael Brant-Zawadzki, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 13, 2020

“Plagues are infrequent but constant, and they do not alter the conditions of mankind (everybody dies) but rather concentrate our misfortunes into moments where everyone thinks for a change that mortality is afoot.”
– Albert Camus

In Camus’ construct, there was no mass media or the internet, yet the fear of imminent death spread like wildfire in a parched California landscape. Nothing is as contagious as that type of fear, as stampedes …

Treating COVID-19 patients in their homes

Bernard Leo Remakus, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 13, 2020

Anecdotal though it may be, a team of Italian doctors and nurses, led by Dr. Luigi Cavanna, has reported apparent success treating COVID-19 patients in their homes. Realizing too many near-death patients were traveling long distances to the hospital emergency room in Piacenza, Italy from their rural villages, Cavanna reasoned many of these patients might be saved if they were diagnosed and treated earlier. He also reasoned his overcrowded hospital …

Should fourth-year medical students graduate early?

Nitin Agrawal

Conditions and Diseases

April 13, 2020

Graduating medical students early is not a completely novel concept. During WWII, there was a significant physician shortage, and various medical schools initiated a 3-year accelerated MD program to produce more physicians. These programs were eventually discontinued in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1918, the influenza pandemic created a similar situation. Third- and fourth-year medical students were enlisted to help …

The moral and ethical dilemmas of COVID-19

Rebecca Elia, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 13, 2020

In all of my thirty years of medical practice, I have never encountered the degree of moral and ethical dilemmas as those created by COVID-19. None of us has experienced anything like this. At no time in our history has all of humanity been at risk for contracting the same potentially deadly disease. And never in my entire career could I have imagined that we would be so woefully unequipped …

The opportunities for medical students in a pandemic

Pratik Doshi and Megha Gupta

Conditions and Diseases

April 13, 2020

The health care system is broken. Physician burnout is at an all-time high. Patients don’t trust us. If you ask any medical student today, they will have heard at least one of these statements from their educators, often coupled with the phrase: We don’t know how to solve it, but your generation will find the solution. While meant as encouragement, these statements paint a gruesome future for the health professions …

Stolen checks and maybe some forgiveness

Raymond Abbott

Conditions and Diseases

April 13, 2020

It took some getting used to in dealing with Mae. My main function soon became acting as her bookkeeper. Each month, I would write checks for her. She was illiterate, and signing her name was about all she could do.
Mae was a fairly ordinary looking lady past 50 by several years. But what was most striking about her was her mischievous personality — in short, she was a flirt.

I found …

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