By the end of April 2022, nearly 40 percent of the country’s baby formula ran out of stock, leading to a major baby formula shortage in the United States. The plummeting availability of baby formula has left parents and caregivers anxious as they struggle to feed their infants, since roughly 75 percent of babies in the U.S. receive at least some formula …
Why the baby formula shortage happened
An excerpt from Pluck: Lessons We Learned for Improving Healthcare and the World, published by Silicon Valley Press.
We met Joseph S. Murtaugh, our new chief at the National Institutes of Health, for the first time on July 3, 1967. He sat behind his desk, looking every bit like …
Medical advances can often stir up ethical issues
KevinMD contributors, virtually without exception, have asserted the solution to events like the horrific tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, is “gun control.” Allow me to present an alternative viewpoint in the interest of diversity of opinion.
First of all, I favor reasonable gun restriction laws. But sadly, I don’t think that will solve the problem. Look at the city of Chicago. It has one of the strictest laws on gun control in …
Gun control vs. violent criminal control
When most health care professionals hear the word “malpractice,” they want to run the other way. This is understandable—but also a missed opportunity. We can leverage malpractice data to target and drive investment in patient safety efforts. Malpractice data shows us that good communication and teamwork are vital to preventing adverse events and malpractice claims—while dramatically improving working conditions and enhancing patient safety.
Malpractice data shows that communication-related factors contribute to …
Malpractice may be negative, but its data can generate positive results
If the U.S. medical system is a chessboard, and providers are the game pieces, America is playing those pieces with one column, row, and role instead of using the whole space. Several journals, economists, and medical professionals forecast physician supply to be dangerously low in 10 to 20-plus years. They’re 100% correct that supply won’t meet demand (as things stand now), but the reasons are flawed. Alarmists have been complaining …
America trains enough doctors: Redefining medical supply and demand
As an emergency medicine physician, I see firsthand the consequences of being a patient in America without health insurance. While the Biden administration previously addressed a key gap in insurance coverage known as the family glitch, other gaps remain, including Medicaid postpartum coverage. Additionally, recent attacks on reproductive rights in this country have left many concerned about the future of health care for people who choose to, …
Medicaid expansion for postpartum support
This is a complicated answer with a complex history.
The most recent factor contributing to the formula shortage is COVID-19 and the pandemic’s effect on supply chains. With the start of the pandemic, people began stockpiling supplies from toilet paper, bottled water, to formula. Concurrently, birth rates decreased due to fear of the virus and its unknown effects on pregnant patients, fetuses, and newborns. Formula consumption was low, decreasing …
Why is there a formula shortage?
A quarter of a million dollars — that’s the amount of debt the average medical student in the United States owes after completing medical school. After all the late nights studying, the endless exams and selfless sacrifice, it’s human nature to expect a historically stable career as the reward — right? I mean, weren’t we all told that “hard work pays off” at some point in our lives? For budding …
The health care system will cause its own physician shortage
Although feminist movements include the fight for reproductive rights, they tend to forget to center on justice. Historically, the protection of women’s reproductive rights has not been a priority for governments; however, the drive and the act of attacking and dismantling a women’s bodily autonomy and dignity has been and continues to be. In the U.S., the Second Great Awakening, a period in the late 1800s that …
Shift from fighting for reproductive rights to fighting for reproductive justice
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) predicts that at least 139,000 doctors will be needed by 2033, particularly in rural and low-income areas. In an attempt to address this need, states have been replacing physicians with non-physician health care providers and reducing physician oversight.
I’ve seen it firsthand.
One day in the ER, a patient came in fatigued and dehydrated. He had been to his …
How to tackle the physician shortage
At the same time that gun violence becomes the leading cause of death for children in the U.S., lawmakers and political pundits caution the public against turning gun violence into a political issue. Yet as Jelani Cobb writes in the New Yorker, the mass killing of children is always already a political issue.
Furthermore, as so many have articulated against the backdrop of decades of …
Politics is health care on a grand scale
“That is a very heteronormative lens.”
These words were uttered to me by a 23-year-old female patient as I explained i-PLEDGE and the steps she must complete to take oral isotretinoin.
The visit started as fairly routine. A young female presented with a complaint of acne. I quickly appraised the patient on entering. She was petite, with a blonde pixie cut. She wore clothes that …
A call to dismantle structural heteronormative care
Nineteen children were killed in a mass shooting in Texas. I have barely escaped the pandemonium of the pediatric emergency department to scarf down a bowl of pasta when I hear the announcement on the breakroom TV. My stomach drops. Again? How is it possible?
I step back into the ED and immediately am called over by an agitated mother whose infant came in with respiratory distress 30 minutes earlier. Any …
Senators are killing children by failing to enact gun control laws
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On May 14, 2022, ten people were fatally shot with three injured at a Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, NY, constituting the second most deadly mass shooting this year at the time of writing. As the number of mass shootings and fatalities continues to climb each year with alarming frequency, researchers and policymakers have sought to examine the factors contributing to an increased incidence of deadly domestic terrorist …
The Buffalo mass shooting and food deserts
It is too early to hear the narratives from the families of the 19 children slain this week at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, near San Antonio, Texas. But narratives from the 1993 Long Island Rail Road shooting, the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, and 16 other deadly gun violence events have just been published by Red Penguin books. From Bullet to Bullhorn is the …
A gun message for woke corporations
Many Americans will lose access to vital health care services in a few short months unless Congress passes bipartisan legislation already introduced in both the House and Senate.
Co-sponsored by Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore) and Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), the Hospital Inpatient Services Modernization Act extends waivers allowing patients with acute illnesses to receive hospital-level care at home. The waivers are set to …
The public health emergency brought health care into the 21st century. Let’s keep moving forward.
I recently wrote a letter to the Davidson County, TN judge who will sentence RaDonda Vaught, a former Vanderbilt University Medical Center nurse convicted on two felony counts in the 2017 death of a patient. RaDonda faces up to 12 years in prison for her role in a complex chain of events that led to the death of Charlene Murphey. I shared my belief that incarcerating Ms. Vaught will not …
Why a nurse should not go to jail
A few years ago, my rural town expected the addition of a “J-1,” or foreign, physician. This addition was meant to alleviate the work of my father, who had been the only neurologist at our underserved hospital for the past few years. And yet, with this J-1’s arrival, my father and his office soon found themselves struggling with more work than ever before.
As many rural physicians can attest, this behavior …
The J-1 work exemption: a flawed solution to the physician shortage
The leaked Supreme Court draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has produced mixed emotions, including amongst health care providers. If the Supreme Court does indeed strike down the rights afforded women in Roe v. Wade almost 50 years ago, it is expected that many if not most states will ban abortions outright or significantly limit women’s access to abortions. If this occurs, as physicians, we should have …
Women’s mental health in an America without Roe
Recently, the New England Journal of Medicine published “Oral Health for All — Realizing the Promise of Science,” authored by some of the most respected officials in dentistry and medicine, including the U.S. Surgeon General. They declared the pressing need to address the “global public health threat” of inequitable dental care. With a surprisingly populist title, it was refreshing for a public health dentist to see a …
Oral health is justice for all
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