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
When a patient walks into an orthopedic spine clinic, most providers are focused on one thing: the back. But after over a decade of caring for patients with chronic pain, I noticed something deeper lurking behind the disc herniation and spinal stenosis: depression. And it was not being addressed.
That is why I launched a quality-improvement (QI) project focused on integrating depression screening into the routine evaluation of orthopedic spine patients. …
The link between chronic back pain and depression
Once upon a time there was a pandemic, despite what the “deniers” and conspiracy theorists say. This rare disease outbreak shook every corner of the globe, yet brought out the best in people, people who put their lives on the line to care for the sick and dying.
But to this day, I still hear and read about folks who are convinced the COVID-19 pandemic was blown out of proportion and …
COVID-19 was real: a doctor’s frontline account
My recent experience as a cancer patient has illuminated many things. It has shown me how our health care system is not standardized and how it sometimes makes patient care decisions based on financial incentives or convenience rather than patient preferences or best clinical practice. Take, for example, the topic of sedation.
The question of whether to sedate is common in pain management, which often involves invasive intraspinal procedures such as …
Why sedation access varies by clinic and hospital
I have been a physician for 44 years.
Besides my office and hospital practice, I also make house calls for less mobile older adults. We all want to stay in the homes where we raised our children, cared for our gardens, and became part of the community. The reality is that we lack the tools and financial resources needed for seniors to “age in place.”
My house calls, though, have provided insights …
Aging in place: Why home care must replace nursing homes
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Academic physician executive William Wertheim discusses his article, “America, our health care workforce training isn’t evolving alongside our needs.” He argues that the U.S. medical system is training professionals who will not …
Why America’s medical training pipeline is failing our future [PODCAST]
We had been trying, but the moment you see the word on the test strip, reality hits differently. My career was on an upward trajectory—I had just been offered a major promotion. And all I could think was: Why now?
When I told my husband how nervous I felt, he assumed it was about my body changing, or how our family of two would soon become three. He was wrong—and visibly …
The silent challenges of female leadership in medicine
We’ve medicalized nearly everything in life—birth, aging, sleep, even boredom. Now, in the spirit of efficiency, we’ve begun medicalizing death itself.
In his unsettling essay “The European way to die,” French novelist Michel Houellebecq warns that the normalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide is not a sign of progress but of profound cultural decay. I didn’t expect to find myself agreeing with him.
As a physician for over three decades, I’ve …
Why medicalizing death could strip it of meaning
The gut-brain axis is a key player in mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety.
The intestinal microbiome (the foundation of the gut-brain axis) influences brain function through bidirectional communication via neural (vagus nerve), immune (cytokines), and metabolic pathways. Microbiota alterations may also impair hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis regulation, which, in turn, affects both psychological stress level (cortisol) and whole-body hormonal balance. What’s more, microbial metabolites (such as short-chain fatty …
How gut bacteria shape your mental health and mood
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Psychiatrist Sabooh S. Mubbashar discusses his article, “Why ‘do no harm’ might be harming modern medicine.” He reveals that the principle “First, do no harm,” or Primum non nocere, is not part of the original Hippocratic Oath but a later, misattributed addition that has become a dangerously oversimplified slogan. …
Is “do no harm” the most misunderstood phrase in medicine? [PODCAST]
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