What a year of change.
A pandemic. Cancer. Death. Loss. Fighting. Abandonment. Pain.
Becoming an orphan. Becoming a caregiver.
My family was hit with a sledgehammer and crushed into pieces. My joyful plans and decades of hard work wiped away with the insidious evil of a 5 x 7 mm tumor that spread like the pandemic, ravaged my mom — stealing her in months.
My hopes and dreams and decades of hard work to …
My days start differently now than they did a year ago. I arrive in my private practice office and take a seat on a meditation cushion as the sun breaks through the curtains. New Orleans streetcars can be heard passing by outside, splintering the stillness of the morning. I grab my phone, turn on Clubhouse, and join my friends and fellow healers in meditating to sounds transmitted by a Chinese …
From physician to holistic healer: my journey on Clubhouse
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) negated the recommendation of its expert panel and approved Aduhelm to treat Alzheimer’s dementia (AD), contending that the possible benefit trumped the lack of evidence of efficacy. The FDA was inexcusably in error in making this decision. Aside from the likely lack of benefit, the use of this drug can result in many negative consequences that make its use ethically questionable.
The manufacturer submitted two …
The FDA was wrong about Aduhelm
“The right choice of words, at the right time, can lift a person out of despair and literally save a person’s life, while an ill-chosen word, or worse, a purposely harsh one, can scar a person. The entire field of narrative medicine is formed around the principle of reviving empathy in doctors …
COVID in Pakistan: a physician’s story [PODCAST]
A rough career transition in 2019 followed by the pandemic highlighted how I was still financially tethered to my job — after 10 years of practicing as a subspecialty trained radiologist, saving, maxing out my retirement accounts, and investing in the stock market and in real estate. Looking around, I saw other physicians in a similar predicament. After years dedicated to rigorous training, we were still trapped by “golden handcuffs.” …
How doctors think about financial independence is dead wrong
Nurses are an essential component of the American health care system and are continually in high demand nationwide. For years, nurses have elected to leave the field or have sought alternative professions instead of working in a traditional nursing role full-time. The pandemic brought into focus the need for work-life balance across professions. Whether strained from high-stress levels, financial upset, demanding hours or an overwhelming workload, nursing …
The rise of non-traditional nursing
The COVID-19 pandemic has been unprecedented as such an event has not happened on such a global scale since 1919, with the Spanish Flu. At the beginning of the pandemic, we sometimes heard muzzled voices of health care providers who experienced sheer horror due to the quickly escalating demand for urgent care, ICU beds, and ventilators.
It is important to note that these incidents were happening on an unprecedented scale due …
Moral injury: What is it, and how is it relevant post-COVID?
Amidst beeping monitors, I sat holding my mother’s frail hand in mine with tears rolling down my face and an eerie silence within my soul. I was trying to make sense of the last 24 hours.
My mother had migrated to Houston after an early retirement at 55 to spend time with her granddaughter and me. But life had other plans, as she was diagnosed with breast cancer a year into …
Culture and end-of-life caretaking
“‘That’s great. You want to start a women in medicine program! How are you going to pay for it?’
This is the most common question and potential barrier from colleagues, leaders, and those who understand the value of these programs. We found that our two-year Women Leaders in Medicine program improved burnout, retention, …
How to pay for women in medicine programs [PODCAST]
Medical school can strip you of everything you have. As you’re doing everything you can to help others, there can be so many levels of dissatisfaction with your career choice and distress around going through medical training.
But what I found was that there was always my loving family to return to whenever something was going particularly poorly. My family was also always there for my successes, which I found to …
5 ways to maintain family bonds in medical school
Photography
A person’s lifetime medication consumption has a familiar and predictable pattern. The more a person ages, the greater their number of taken medication. However, the public behavior in initiating medication has been changed compared to thirty years ago.
Nowadays, parents demand to get their hands on OTC meds for their infants and toddlers.
In this piece, I am interested …
The life cycle of medication consumption
“We know the ER’s revolving door will continue to spin for so many children and adolescents who seek help in the heat of their personal crisis. Some will need to stay in the hospital – to heal their bodies and minds and even fight for their lives. Some – the lucky ones …
Dying of loneliness: the COVID-19 epidemic in children and adolescents [PODCAST]
In 2016, I wrote an article for KevinMD about using social media to get promoted to associate professor. Well, I’m thrilled to write this follow-up article discussing how I not only got promoted again but how physician involvement on social media is becoming increasingly recognized across academic institutions for inclusion in promotion and tenure criteria.
It would be naïve to think that sending many Tweets or having a …
How I used social media to get promoted to professor
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Many drug ads in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s would offend today.
In an ad for Valium, we are told that the woman pictured (“Jan”) is “psychoneurotic” because she is unmarried at age 35. “You probably see many such Jans in your practice,” says the ad—“The unmarrieds with low self-esteem. Jan never found a man to measure up to her father.”
Valium was …
These journal ads could not run today
The orders from the state seemed to come suddenly, although we all knew we would have to adjust our methods of treating our clients, the news wasn’t good, and seeing anyone in person was treacherous since many still thought it was a hoax and they didn’t believe they needed to be cautious. Some would wear a hazmat suit if they could get their hands on one. As a psychiatric nurse …
Nothing prepared me for telehealth’s nightmare
Listen to psychiatrist Emily Watters’ work with the homeless population and how she got her start writing cartoons, educating patients using out-of-the-box communication strategies.
Emily Watters is a psychiatrist and can be reached at The Cartoon Shrink.
She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD articles, “Blood …
Meet the physician who educates patients with cartoons [PODCAST]
Burnout among doctors is not something new. In fact, way before the pandemic, 69% of physicians reported they were somewhat or incredibly happy in 2020, before the pandemic started.
This number drastically fell to 49% when COVID-19 stepped in. This is a statistic that we need to be aware of.
For many of us, we embarked on our journey in medicine with naïve optimism. We stepped into medical school thinking about the …
The dark truth of physician burnout
I will never forget the first time my thinning hairline hit me in the face with an openhanded, five-finger slap.
It was in February of 2014, the spring semester of my freshman year in (undergraduate) college. I was only 19 at the time. A then-football teammate of mine and I had placed a bet on the upcoming Super Bowl XLVIII. I had all of my marbles placed on the Denver Broncos, …
How I accepted hair loss at 19
The 20th century was an explosion of scientific innovation and discovery. The success of chemistry, physics and biology to produce things such as antibiotics, radiography and genetic analysis could not be ignored.
Medicine is not now, nor has it ever been, a “science.” But over the past century, medicine became science-based. This means that while medicine was not in adherence with the scientific method, it did rely on …
Does the FDA approval of aducanumab mark the return of science-based medicine?
“For the folks who are either physicians or becoming care providers, I hope you choose to familiarize yourself with this odd yet common form of loss. I encourage you to respect a woman’s right to decide at what point and to what degree her fetus and its life or loss has …
Let’s talk about vanishing twin syndrome [PODCAST]
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