An excerpt from Whispers of the Mind: A Neurologist’s Memoir.
I have never been one to seek out medical care, as I have been fortunate to have been in excellent health most of my life. So, when I presented to my GYN for my yearly follow-up, I brought up my first health complaint in the twenty years I had been seeing her, abnormal bleeding. We were colleagues and she knew …
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Physician-scientist Diego R. Hijano discusses his article “How humor builds trust in pediatric oncology.” Diego shares how personal loss and his own cultural and linguistic experiences shaped his approach to care, teaching …
We all know the look of a patient about to crash. The monitor has not flatlined yet, but the story is already in the vitals: The pulse is racing, the pressure is dropping, the skin is clammy.
That is the U.S. economy right now. Debt overload looks like a chronic hemorrhage. High interest rates are a sustained hypertensive crisis. Political paralysis is the family arguing in the hallway while the patient …
Physicians who are also business owners have two jobs: treating patients and running their business. Hiring and keeping employees is one of the job descriptions of the latter. It is no surprise that choosing and maintaining employee benefits is not at the top of an exciting to-do list. Even if hospital systems are not your direct competition, they are often competing for …
An excerpt from The Parkinson’s Plan: A New Path to Prevention and Treatment.
The Parkinson’s universe
In 2002, we proposed a simple Parkinson’s care model. The patient is the sun, and all multidisciplinary care should orbit around the patient, not the doctors. The sun is vital but only part of the universe. It is time to expand our Parkinson’s care model.
The caregivers
If we …
An excerpt from Scary Diagnosis: Navigating Fear, Finding Strength, and Securing the Health Care You Deserve.
Doctors are the centerpiece of the health care system. In large part, they have designed it, written its rules, lobbied the government to support it financially, and, through doctor-friendly regulation, they are its main financial beneficiaries. For most patients, their doctor is not just the centerpiece of a huge system; they represent the entire …
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Primary care physician Jerina Gani discusses her article “My journey to loving primary care again.” Jerina shares her deeply personal story of nearly walking away from medicine after burnout, exhaustion, and endless …
Introduction: a double-edged disruptor
Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly insinuated itself and is transforming nearly every corner of modern life. Health care is no exception. With the rise of advanced chatbots, symptom checkers, and health-focused algorithms, patients now have 24/7 access to vast medical knowledge at their fingertips in seconds. The excitement is understandable: AI can demystify medical “doctor-speak” or jargon, suggest possible diagnoses and treatment options, and empower patients to …
On October 7, 2023, more than 1,200 people were murdered in a single day in the Hamas-led terror attacks in southern Israel, and over 250 individuals were taken hostage. This was the deadliest antisemitic attack since the Holocaust. For many Jewish health care workers, it marked a devastating shift: Our hospitals and clinics were no longer safe, not because of external conflict, but simply because we are Jewish. We had …
I love technology. I love the health care AI I use every week including Viz.ai and OpenEvidence and Glass Health. I am generally a tech optimist. And even as cries of overhype on artificial intelligence start wading into the public discourse, I truly believe that AI will as fundamentally alter society and health care as the internet or the mobile phone.
But, I am convinced the whole industry is doing AI …
People living with inherited bleeding disorders (including those with mild and moderate hemophilia and females affected by hemophilia) face persistent unmet needs that are often overlooked in clinical research and treatment guidelines. About twenty percent of mild hemophilia cases experience serious bleeding episodes, challenging current assumptions of their benign course.
Unmet needs
Diagnosis and awareness: Patients with mild and moderate hemophilia often face a delayed or missed diagnosis, leading to unrecognized and …
In 2024, centralized cryptocurrency exchanges recorded approximately USD 18.4 trillion in trading volume, with Binance alone accounting for forty percent (~USD 7.7 trillion). While the total number of cryptocurrency holders exceeded 600 million globally, active traders (those engaging in high-frequency or large-scale trading) appear limited to thirty to sixty million monthly users. Epidemiological data indicate these traders skew male (≈sixty-one percent), primarily aged 25 to 34 (thirty-four percent of owners), …
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Chief nursing officer Rhonda Collins discusses her article “Nurse-initiated protocols for sepsis: a strategic imperative for patient care and hospital operations.” Rhonda explains why sepsis, the leading cause of death in U.S. …
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“Do you have a key?” my grandma asks me. I hesitate and she repeats herself, “Do you have a key to this place?” She is sitting in a hospital chair behind one of those hospital tables with a tray full of hospital food in front of her. She is practically skin and bones; her shirt and pajama pants are hanging off of her. My mom is sitting on the bed, …
As a founder in digital mental health, I’ve watched our industry celebrate reaching $8.34 billion in valuation while systematically failing 40 percent of the population. This isn’t just a moral failure, it’s a $20 billion market opportunity that’s being ignored because of cultural blindness. For physicians trying to refer diverse patients to digital mental health resources, the options are frustratingly inadequate. With the total U.S. behavioral health market valued …
The vow was not ceremonial. It was lived.
We were in Waverly, Ohio on 9/11, a town that did not make headlines, but held its own kind of gravity. The clinic was open. Kathy was chasing after Robert, age 8, who had darted toward the library at the end of the street, eager to explore its corners before school resumed. She did not call him back. She followed. That was the …
With over 270 active drug shortages and growing global instability, the United States must protect itself from a worsening crisis in cancer care. The fragile supply of generic chemotherapy drugs like cisplatin, which is important for treating bladder, lung, and testicular cancer, could collapse if geopolitical tensions between India and Pakistan escalate further. To preserve this diminishing supply, the U.S. must reduce its overreliance on Indian pharmaceutical manufacturing and …
I see it every week in my practice: Patients obsessed with their cholesterol numbers. LDL, HDL, triglycerides, the full alphabet soup. They have been trained to believe these numbers hold the keys to life and death.
But here is something I cannot stop thinking about: When you look under the microscope, an atherosclerotic plaque (the thing that clogs arteries and leads to heart attacks) looks an awful lot like a tuberculosis …
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Physician leader Janet A. Jokela discusses its article “Collective action as a path to patient-centered care.” The piece reflects on the evolution of physician unions since the 1980s, beginning with housestaff associations …
As an academic trauma surgeon and intensive care physician, I have spent decades honing my clinical skills and teaching them to others. The recent milestone reached by Microsoft’s new AI system, the MAI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO), is a reminder that the cognitive frontier of medicine is shifting, not gradually, but in leaps. MAI-DxO reportedly diagnosed complex cases from the New England Journal of Medicine with eighty percent accuracy, compared to …
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