How many times have we heard “Whatever you say doc, I know you will do right by me. You always have and I know you will.” Or, “What do you think, doctor? Do you think I should do this?” Or, …
How federal actions threaten vaccine policy and trust
Emergency medicine residency: where the pager announces before your coffee cools, and your personal life takes a number far behind sepsis alerts and trauma activations. Amidst this storm, there’s an unexpected survival manual—not found in Tintinalli’s or Rosen’s, but in Mark Manson’s self-help book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
Manson argues that life’s meaning isn’t found in chasing positivity, but in embracing struggle, choosing your battles wisely, …
The unfiltered truth about surviving emergency medicine residency with purpose
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Renowned fertility specialist Oluyemisi (Yemi) Famuyiwa discusses her article, “When bleeding disorders meet IVF: Navigating von Willebrand disease in fertility treatment.” She explains that von Willebrand disease (VWD), the most common inherited …
How to safely undergo IVF with von Willebrand disease [PODCAST]
It’s all fun and games until your health becomes one big puzzle to solve, and little do many people know what risks and hazards might surround us during our favorite summertime activities. I learned this personally after what should have been an innocent business trip turned into a year-and-a-half nightmare for me after contaminated water made me sick. I contracted bacteria that led to a secondary chronic inflammatory breast disease. What …
Summer’s dark side: How not to dim your fun
When people think of Parkinson’s disease (PD), they often picture Michael J. Fox or Muhammad Ali, iconic figures who bravely shared their diagnoses. But the real face of Parkinson’s is much more diverse than what we see in the media, and the research that shapes our understanding of the disease has not caught up.
Despite affecting people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, …
Closing the diversity gap in Parkinson’s research
I knew there was a cost when I chose to become a physician: The long hours, delayed gratification, the strained relationships. I could understand these things as familiar from my lived experiences. I knew there would be a financial burden, and having been raised by two immigrant parents, an electrician and a nurse, I was no stranger to the pressures of financial insecurity. I was fortunate too: my parents did …
Why primary care doctors are drowning in debt despite saving lives
A few weeks ago, I heard Michelle Obama say something that stopped me in my tracks:
“We have to learn to be OK with the regular days. The in-between. The parts of life that aren’t exciting.”
I thought of my kids in the back seat during a long car ride, sighing dramatically, claiming they were “literally dying” of boredom. I thought of patients sitting in a waiting room with nothing but their …
Why boredom is good for your brain and health
I first grasped the disconnect between health care professionals and the public while designing a brochure for a cornea donation campaign.
My original concept featured a young boy smiling, wearing an eye shield—an approachable image meant to encourage public participation. But the overseeing specialist rejected it. He insisted instead on a clinical close-up of a post-surgical eye, sutures and all. To him, it represented medical success. To potential donors, it was …
How health care branding can unintentionally stigmatize patients
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Physician executive Steven Lane discusses his article, “Why interoperability is key to achieving the quintuple aim in health care.” He explains that true interoperability is not just about technology but about aligning …
How interoperability solves the biggest challenges in health care [PODCAST]
I became a respiratory therapist at 28, after years of trying to get into nursing school. It wasn’t until a friend, an RT at my city’s only level one trauma center, said, “You don’t want to be a nurse. You want to be an RT,” that something clicked. He let me shadow for a shift in the medical cardiac ICU, and I fell in love with the work instantly.
Watching him …
Why I left health care after 11 years as a respiratory therapist
Sickle cell disease (SCD) is frequently referred to as an invisible disease and is often overlooked due to a lack of research and overall resource shortages resulting in substandard clinical care. Part of the problem is difficulty objectively identifying SCD characteristics due to lack of laboratory markers and poor objective pain indicators. This disease mainly affects African American populations. Systemic marginalization of stigmatized populations results in less funding; and therefore, …
The hidden cost of racism in sickle cell disease treatment
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Pediatrician and certified coach Jessie Mahoney discusses her article, “Why the future of medicine depends on leading from the heart.” Drawing from her experience leading a workshop for women cardiologists, she explores …
How to lead from the heart in a system that rewards the intellect [PODCAST]
“Dr. Who?” the child asked.
“Dr. Hijano,” I said. “But you can call me Dr. Diego. Like Go Diego Go! Dora the Explorer’s cousin, the one with the baby jaguar who saves the rainforest.”
A pause. A smile. And just like that, the ice broke. In pediatric oncology, that is no small thing.
I work in a pediatric cancer center, most often in the bone marrow transplant unit. When people hear this, they …
How humor builds trust in pediatric oncology
I remember a night during my first year of residency in oncology when I was on call. It was after midnight, and I was sitting at the ward counter.
I often struggle to sleep during night shifts, especially when I’m the only doctor on call. I prefer to stay at the counter because I dread the thought of some terrible thing happening and not being able to reach the ward in …
What a dying patient taught me about compassion in silence
The message came through before dawn: “Our EHR is down. No access to patient charts.”
In a rural clinic, that is not just a technical inconvenience. It is the mother who drove forty miles before sunrise to get her child’s asthma medication, the farmer who left the fields to review his lab results, the elderly patient who cannot make another trip for months. When systems go dark, there is no backup …
When the clinic becomes the battlefield: Defending rural health care in the age of AI-driven attacks
The phone call from my insurance carrier came in unexpectedly one morning. “We see that you’ve just been discharged from the hospital …”
I blinked. I had neither been admitted nor discharged from any hospital. When I pressed for details, the caller claimed her records showed I’d been hospitalized for more than a month. Why? For which condition? She didn’t have that information, she told me. Only the dates.
My first thought: …
Poorly targeted patient outreach is wasted outreach
The truth is not hiding. We have known for decades what allows physicians to thrive and what erodes their well-being. The science has been published, the interventions described, and the solutions tested. What we face is not a crisis of knowledge; it is a crisis of action.
I was reminded of this recently when an emergency physician preparing a talk on wellness asked me for help. She wanted to share with …
Ending burnout through structure, not gimmicks
For years, I didn’t realize the name for what I was experiencing as a primary care pediatrician was burnout. I just thought I wasn’t enough—not good enough, not hardworking enough, not experienced enough. That self-doubt didn’t stay confined to my role as a doctor; it crept into how I felt as a parent, a spouse, a community member.
Nothing ever felt like enough. So I did what I was trained to …
The silent burnout epidemic among parents and doctors
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Physician executive Laura Kohlhagen discusses her article, “Here’s what providers really need in a modern EHR.” She argues that since electronic health records were originally designed for billing and …
How AI is finally fixing the electronic health record [PODCAST]
When I was a new hospitalist in a tertiary center, I once told a colleague, “Looks like I got an easy admit.” He just stared at me.
It didn’t take long to understand why.
Vitals can be stable. Labs can look clean. But patients—especially those we assume are “simple”—rarely are. There’s a language beyond numbers: the way a patient breathes, a hesitation in their tone, the look in a spouse’s eye. Over …
Why AI must support, not replace, human intuition in health care
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