An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025)
“I am a Black gay man from Detroit,” spoke Chris Veal mid-way into a podcast when he was a fourth-year medical student at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine. He was coming out of a seven-year depression, COVID-19 had struck, he lost five family members to the disease, and on top of …
As health care writers and patient advocates, the authors are engaged in multiple projects intended to encourage major policy changes by highly resistant U.S. and state public health agencies. Misdirected policies and disinformation from these agencies are literally killing patients every day by denying them safe and effective management of agonizing pain, destroying the field of pain medicine, and criminalizing its practitioners.
This is institutionalized madness. It needs to stop. Now, …
Archimedes said “Eureka,” the ladies at The Knights of Columbus Hall say “Bingo,” and as an ophthalmologist, I say “This is a real eye-opener.” You may or may not recall my exasperated September/October 2025 editorial. The title is self-explanatory: “You have sudden onset of chest pain? The doctor can see you in five months: The travesty of physician unavailability.” Many of you share my pain and concern. In post-publication discussions …
Health insurers have failed in their promise to deliver quality and value to the taxpayers, providers, employers, and their subscribers.
If you find a wasteful government program, isn’t there an obligation to foster a public discussion about it? Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP) has developed an analysis that reveals the waste in allowing private health plans to manage Medicaid medical services. According to PNHP, returning management of medical services …
The inventor of the Post-it note deserves a medal. Not for convenience, but for clarity. In my practice, those little squares became tactical weapons, bright flags of truth in a sea of institutional delusion. My mother once told Kathy, before our wedding, never to touch the scraps of paper I left everywhere. She understood that my visual memory depended on those markers. Each Post-it was a breadcrumb, a map, a …
At two o’clock in the morning, the emergency department doors open to a familiar story. A middle-aged man arrives with massive gastrointestinal bleeding, severe jaundice, and advanced cirrhosis from decades of alcohol use. He has no insurance, no primary care provider, no stable home, and no ongoing addiction treatment. The next 10 days bring mechanical ventilation, endoscopic procedures, dialysis, and intensive care. The total bill will exceed $100,000, nearly all …
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Physical therapists Ziya Altug and Shirish Sachdeva discuss their article “Why your clinic waiting room may affect patient outcomes.” Ziya and Shirish explore how the ambiance of a medical office significantly impacts …
I had been trying to write this story for a long time. The topic is so heavy that it took a great deal of courage and emotional strength to finally put it into words. This story is not about a patient; rather, it is about a caregiver.
I met Mrs. N. in 2020. She travelled from Gujranwala to Islamabad (a distance of 223 kilometers) to begin her treatment. Mrs. N. was …
Let’s talk about physician wellness.
Not the version that looks good in press releases or PowerPoint slides. I am talking about the lived, messy, heart-and-body version of wellness, the one that actually matters.
Because somewhere between the lavender oil diffusers and the “wellness committees,” the real meaning of physician well-being got lost. It has become a buzzword, something hospitals display proudly on banners and conference agendas, as if saying the word “wellness” …
Picture a “No Entry” sign or a speed limit. A simple red circle needs no translation for a driver in Tokyo, Tehran, or Toronto. That’s more than just convenience; it’s a global safety net.
But in health care, where a misunderstanding can be deadly, our communication hasn’t kept up. We still rely overwhelmingly on words, pages of dense text handed to patients who are stressed, exhausted, older, or struggling with a …
I recently attended a very large professional conference. In a rush to make it everywhere and yet feed myself, I was running to get breakfast before the sessions and spilled the majority of this much-desired coffee all over my shirt. Here I was, standing with an impressive, unmistakable, impossible-to-hide giant stain of dark liquid spreading across the front of my solid blue shirt and sleeve with nothing to hide it.
It …
As a pediatrician, I spent many years in a busy, at times hectic, mostly enjoyable practice before retiring and segueing into teaching. Now as an adjunct professor in pediatrics, I aspire to help future health care workers pursue a career in pediatrics.
I have often asked myself: Have I missed anything about the day-to-day of practicing pediatrics?
My answer was what I truly missed were the interactions I had with the children: …
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Triple board-certified physician in adult and geriatric psychiatry and addiction medicine, and the founder of The Aging Parent Coach Barbara Sparacino discusses her article “Why caring for a parent is hard for …
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During my pediatrics rotation in my third year of medical school, the most important skill I learned was how to listen more carefully.
Children rarely have the language or power to fully articulate their needs. They are forced to rely on adults, systems, and institutions to advocate on their behalf. In pediatrics, that responsibility is not an abstract idea. It shows up in exam rooms where parents must choose to pay …
A patient stopped me in the hallway recently, not in an exam room, not seated, not “ready” for a clinical conversation. Just a human being catching me between visits and asking a question that felt heavier than any lab result:
“Doc, is this finally the thing that will work? Or is it just another trap?”
That question is the GLP-1 era in one sentence. And with the launch of oral Wegovy, it …
We owe patients a better explanation about food.
The food didn’t change. The world did, and our guidelines followed.
For many patients, dietary advice feels less like science and more like whiplash.
Their breakfast looks the same. Their milk is the same. Their daily habits are exactly where they left them. What shifts, sometimes violently, is the label we attach to it: healthy, unhealthy, recommended, discouraged.
Consider milk
For decades, we told patients to switch …
Few things scare parents faster than seeing blood where it doesn’t belong.
Maybe your child took a hard fall off a bike. Maybe there was a rough sports collision. Maybe it was a car accident, and everyone is still shaking. Then a nurse asks for a urine sample, or your child goes to the bathroom and you notice pink or red in the toilet.
Your mind immediately goes to the worst place.
As …
An excerpt from On All Sides of the Bed: One physician’s/CEO’s journey.
In the early summer of 2013, our hospital collided with a Black Swan.
Before Europeans discovered Australia, they were familiar only with white swans. The discovery of black swans overturned a long-held assumption. In business and risk theory, a “Black Swan” refers to a rare, unpredictable event with massive consequences, a concept popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. For us, …
Human rights are understood to be universal and egalitarian. They are inalienable, indivisible, and grounded in a shared moral intuition: that human dignity deserves protection. One of the most widely accepted expressions of that intuition is the obligation to care for those who are physically or emotionally ill. Yet despite this near-universal belief, modern health care systems continue to struggle with a fundamental question: Is health care a human right, …
Voicemail has quietly become one of the most fragile points in outpatient care, not because clinicians or staff are failing, but because the system itself no longer fits the reality of modern health care.
Every day, patients call clinics with legitimate needs: appointment requests, medication questions, post-procedure concerns, insurance clarifications. When no one answers, they are routed to voicemail and asked to leave a message. From that moment on, the system …
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