An excerpt from My Grief is Not Like Yours.
In March of 2018, I took Momma to a women’s conference in Dallas. We didn’t get great seats, but we were in the middle section, halfway back in a group with about 2,300 other people. I was hoping there would be a …
Lessons from Momma: the power of being present
There has always been a research bias against the case of one. A success story that isn’t part of a research pool is called “anecdotal.” The implication is that no doctor should base treatment on a story of one. Then we devised the term “evidence-based” to reinforce the notion that physician decisions should be based entirely on numbers in research studies. However, the physician’s prerogative has always been to read …
Personalized hypertension care in pregnancy: Beyond evidence-based thresholds
Patient safety, patient experience, workforce health, and cost-effectiveness are critical outcomes that share important common roots. They are all impacted by our ability to communicate effectively and respectfully. This can be challenging, in part, because communication involves underlying emotional intelligence, which is hard to develop and practice, especially in high-stakes, high-stress work environments or toxic cultures.
Furthermore, our ability to communicate affects our capacity to establish healthy professional relationships, collaborate in …
“YES AND”: a vital, versatile, and visionary leadership tool
Everyone has phases, stages, and degrees of mental disease throughout their lives, especially children, adolescents, and young adults. It is a part of normal growth and development to go through phases of change. Sometimes, a young person gets stuck in a phase, and it becomes something more—a mental health disorder—and they may receive a diagnosis. Often, if the young person can receive the help and support they need, this phase …
The Cactus Kid: an analogy for parents and youth who are living with mental dis-ease
Sitting in class was always a terrifying experience, not knowing if I was going to be the next one called on to read. My mind would race ahead trying to figure out a strategy on how to get out of it. I would excuse myself from the room or blame a sore throat, anything to avoid reading in front of my peers. On the rare occasions that I was called …
The pursuit of medicine through dyslexia
An excerpt from Meet Skulle.
This bone goes from the top of my sternum to the top of my shoulder. Can you name it? I have one on each side.
Did you guess the …
The secrets of shoulder bones unveiled
Locum tenens agreements can be useful to physicians in many circumstances. In addition to serving as a way to supplement your income during vacations, physicians often enter locum tenens agreements between jobs, to provide income while waiting for interviews or for credentialing to be completed at a new position.
In many ways, reviewing a locum tenens agreement is similar to reviewing a physician employment agreement, but there are unique aspects to …
Locum tenens agreements for physicians
Many arise each day with a scenario of expectations to be achieved. For those individuals of working age, some of these expectations revolve around our jobs, put into place by our employers over which we have little to no control. But what about those narratives, those stories, that we tell ourselves in the middle of the night or the ones that pop into our heads in the middle of the …
Discovering healing through storytelling
Dealing with a toxic person close to you is traumatic, draining, and upsetting. My older sister is a toxic person, and I endured her behavior for over 40 years. I recommend making a clean break from a toxic person around the holidays and birthdays when their behavior is at its worst. You may blame yourself for tolerating the behavior for so long. For the longest time, I blamed myself for …
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ recent decision to move away from the “wait and see” philosophy to a more proactive intervention when dealing with childhood obesity got me reflecting on how “wait and see” is still used in many other aspects of children’s development.
As a speech therapist and a mother of a child who was at risk for developmental delays, I had personal experience with this approach. My son …
How early intervention can transform a child’s speech development
When I started visiting patients in nursing homes, a good many of them had some degree of dementia. In its earliest form, a person with dementia could recall what they were doing when they found out about 9/11, or when Kennedy was shot, or when Pearl Harbor was bombed in the Second World War. However, they couldn’t recall their most recent …
How dementia and COVID-19 robbed the baby doll of love
As a member of the Washington D.C. Center for AIDS Research, I’ve been deeply grateful to see how medications such as PrEP are significantly reducing the toll of HIV. Additionally, we have made great strides with limiting the transmission of HIV. A plethora of research has proven that if HIV is undetectable in your system, it cannot be spread to others. This is known as “U …
Patients aging with HIV: What role can doctors play?
Today’s health care system is in a state of drastic flux. Gone are the days of private practice family doctors, the “Marcus Welby, MDs,” who stood ever-ready to heal the sick and comfort the disillusioned. They were the sole decision-makers in the care of their patients and had the welfare of their patients at the forefront. Now, the corporate blanket has fallen upon the field of medicine, oftentimes blurring the …
Inside the world of family medicine: a patient’s eye-opening account
A teenage girl was found alone, having a seizure on a bench outside our clinic’s front door. She had never been inside our clinic, but it was our fault she was seizing.
The office manager from the dentist’s office upstairs found the girl as she returned from lunch. Not knowing what to do, she opened our clinic door and called for help. Our front office staff summoned the doctors from our …
How a teenager with seizures became the face of trauma-informed care
Reportedly, there are at least 1.6 million people who identify as transgendered in the United States. Approximately one-third of them are transgendered male-to-females, referred to as “T-girls.” These individuals have a strong desire to be passable without undergoing surgery, relying instead on hormone therapy. However, hormonal therapy is not without risks. Testosterone, used in protocols for transgendered males, can increase the chances of venous thromboembolism (VTE). Similarly, estrogen, used by …
Transgender health risks in hormone therapy
As someone who had an early life in rural Nigeria, I strongly believe that the diet debates are out-of-touch elite pastimes born out of food glut in Western societies. For survival, all living things evolved and adapted to scarcity, and humans have been appropriately described as opportunistic omnivores who would eat whatever is available. How supposedly omnivorous humans turned out to be sharply divided into tribalistic die-hard vegan, keto, Mediterranean, …
The ketogenic diet: a historical perspective and survival consequences
Recently, growing attention has been given to the fact that some types of surgery may be overrated. This article succinctly summarizes the situation, citing dozens of studies showing that some orthopedic surgeries popular in past decades had no better results than non-invasive treatments.
This issue is deeply personal to me. In 2020, during the pandemic, I sustained an injury to my left knee, experiencing severe pain, swelling, and loss of …
Optimize your knee injury recovery without surgery
I spent years researching and writing about the health care crisis. It was depressing and isolating — traumatizing. When I met someone with more reach, it was a relief to be able to stop.
Early on, it was obvious to me that our medical health care crisis is actually a mental health crisis. It is about disconnectedness and devaluation of relationships, a basic need. Evidence abounds. The Read more…
How trauma, health care, and kindness are the keys to contagious change
I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis during my second year of medical school. It happened while I was on a neurology rotation when I approached the neurologist after a lecture and expressed my suspicion of a flare-up. Subsequently, a lumbar puncture and a contrast brain MRI confirmed the diagnosis, leading to my treatment with IV steroids and later disease-modifying medications.
It has now been 18 years since my diagnosis, during which …
From medical student to MS warrior: Navigating life with multiple sclerosis
If you are a patient, we all are at some point. Undoubtedly, you have experienced some of the difficulties patients face today in getting approved for and receiving medical care in a timely fashion. From scheduling doctor visits to undergoing tests, procedures, obtaining medications, and even surgeries, the process can be challenging.
It’s easy to be tempted to blame your doctor for the long wait times to schedule an appointment, the …
The struggle is real for patients and doctors
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