“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.”
– Fred Rogers
Cheslie Kryst, a former Miss USA, lawyer, and entertainment correspondent, died by suicide. She was smart, beautiful, accomplished, and young.
A police officer was quoted saying, “Not only beautiful but she was smart — she was a lawyer … she has a life that anyone would be jealous of. It’s so sad.”
The message about suicide continues …
Recently, I was on several calls concerning the precipitous rise of COVID-19 cases and the burden to the health care system. There’s no doubt that we are at a point where challenges become crisis, and crisis becomes collapse. The constant influx of “breaking news” into our psyche has blunted any ability to decipher the nuances of this escalation.
But as this is not our first go-round, most stakeholders have already exhausted …
An excerpt from At Heaven’s Door: What Shared Journeys to the Afterlife Teach About Dying Well and Living Better.
What brings you here?
I ask this question of every person who steps through the door because they have come to talk about death—the most universal of all human experiences yet the most difficult to discuss.
In modern culture, we have an uneasy relationship …
An excerpt from Heart Medicine: How to Stop Painful Patterns and Find Peace and Freedom–at Last. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.
For many months, Leila could not stop ruminating about the fateful event of spilling coffee on her ex–mother-in-law’s tunic. Images from the traumatic event on her son’s wedding day returned repeatedly, intermingling with related …
How can you know that science done quickly during a crisis is good science?
This question has taken on new relevance with the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Researchers developed vaccines in under a year — easily breaking the previous record of four years. But that pace of development may be part of the reason about 1 in 7 unvaccinated adults in the U.S. say Read more…
In the ongoing saga of the pandemic, there is the debate whether to wear a mask or not. These are physical masks that temporarily hide our face, but we all wear another type of mask, a metaphorical mask. These are the masks we put on to present who we want the world to see. People who are referred to as having “high functioning autism” often put on the greatest masks …
I have been following the controversy surrounding the approval of the new Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab with great interest. Until a year and a half ago, I worked as a neurologist in an adult general neurology clinic. Many of my patients had dementia. While I thoroughly enjoyed seeing these patients and their family members, I often felt helpless when treating them. When I left clinical practice to explore a non-clinical career …
The percentage of teens using illicit substances dropped significantly in 2021 as the pandemic forced them into isolation from friends, classrooms, and extracurricular activities. Alcohol, marijuana, and nicotine vaping – the most commonly used substances by teens all showed declines from 2020.
These findings were reported by a Monitoring the Future survey conducted by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.
The survey is given annually to students …
Like most parents, my children are my world. I would do anything to protect them and keep them healthy. It is Darwinian. Instinctual.
Most of us get by with a combination of sage advice from generations past interspersed with a “know better do better” approach. Personally and professionally, I encountered this duality pretty quickly. In March 2016, my husband and I hopped on a plane to Los Angeles with our 4-month-old …
A 37-year-old man was diagnosed with Lyme carditis after presenting to the emergency department (ED) with fever, weakness, history of tick bite, and prolonged PR interval of 394 ms (a type of heart block) and positive Lyme testing. In the ED, second-degree AV block was noted intermittently on the monitor but not documented. Both infectious disease and cardiology were consulted, and the recommendation was to continue IV ceftriaxone for 28 …
As we anticipated the release of new CDC data on overdose deaths, those of us who specialize in substance use disorders braced for grim statistics, but this milestone was still shocking: over 100,000 lives lost to overdoses in one year, the great majority from opioids. Overdose deaths began outpacing traffic fatalities in the United States in 2013, but 2.5 times as many people died from an …
It became a prison to me — impending doom.
I knew I had only three months left before I could retire. Three months isn’t long, but it is a lifetime away.
That long drive to work in that heavy highway traffic where there was always a collision. The anxiety of the drive knowing all along there was even more anxiety to come.
The patients that were involuntarily committed — forever schizophrenics and bipolar, …
Thank you, Dr. Kara Pepper, for your recent article “Why you should not use BMI for your New Year’s resolution.”
Our weight-obsessed, BMI-focused culture has been a thorn in my side for much of my life. And since eating disorders thrive in secrecy, let’s get talking. In sharing my story, I hope to encourage revision of the way we speak to patients and utilize (or do not utilize) …
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I would love to say 2021 outshone 2020. But I think sometime around mid-fall of last year, we realized the joke was, sadly, on humanity, and that was not going to happen.
Yes, we finally had vaccines (thank God and bless those involved forever), but the life purpose of a virus is to replicate, somehow, someway — and Delta was born.
The tragedy of the preceding winter still haunted all of us …
“It’s my right not to be vaccinated. It’s my body.”
So goes the argument for the COVID anti-vaxxers, emphasizing personal freedom taking precedence over everything else. Unfortunately, and perhaps unfairly, we health care providers do not have that same freedom; our profession requires us to perform our duties despite the risks to us. We place ourselves in jeopardy each day we come to work, and we cannot simply refuse care for …
“You have to show proof that you have something wrong with you in order for you to get the medicine. I put forth, and I maintain that if I was white, I wouldn’t have to go through that.”
– Dr. Susan Moore.
In a 7-minute-and-22-second Facebook video documenting her treatment at a suburban hospital in Indiana, Dr. Susan Moore, a Black woman physician, articulated the collective desperation and frustration that was a …
An executive father. Alcoholism. And that gallon of wine.
As I walked through the wine section at the grocery store, I spotted one of those gallon jugs of wine. I was searching for Christmas presents for my friends. But that brand glared at me.
Daddy — my IBM executive father.
We loved him so. But year by year, his demons took over. Every night, there was a gallon of wine. On weekends, he’d …
People who experience debilitating back pain come to their doctors with one pressing question: Do I need back surgery? Often, they are surprised to hear me, a neurosurgeon, answer, “No.” In many cases, physical therapy, pain management, weight loss management, and physiatry can help people to delay – and in some cases avoid – back surgery.
However, if those remedies don’t work well enough, a person might decide that spine surgery …
Almost two years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have confronted the illness and loss of millions of lives and the sad and dangerous reality of having a health care system and a society full of moral gaps, inequities, and disparities. This unprecedented and complex situation challenged all of us on many levels. While facing high levels of unexpected fear, uncertainty, and distress, the well-known socio-cultural and demographic …
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