Jacob M. Appel is a psychiatrist and medical ethicist.

Is it ethical to force unvaccinated patients to use telehealth only?

Physician
August 17, 2021

COVID-19 has raised many ethical challenges for health care providers, including the level of risk they must take when providing patient care. Early in the pandemic, the ability to mitigate these risks was relatively limited, especially when caring for hospitalized patients. Shortages of personal protective equipment rendered mitigation even more challenging.

As a result, it has been reported that 3,607 frontline health care workers died of COVID-19 in the U.S. from …

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Is it ethical to force unvaccinated patients to use telehealth only?

Wisdom for child fellows and fellow children

Physician
June 21, 2020

This is the text of the keynote graduation speech given to the child and adolescent psychiatry residents at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City on June 18, 2020.

Let me begin by confessing that I am not a child psychiatrist.

I am an adult psychiatrist.

Or, as my mother says, I’m almost a real doctor.

One of the first things one learns as an …

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Wisdom for child fellows and fellow children

What they don’t tell you at medical graduation

Physician
May 26, 2019

I was recently asked to give a speech to the graduating residents in my department, and while preparing my talk, I reflected upon what I wish I had known when I had first embarked on a career in academic medicine — and what nobody was willing to tell me.   So what follows are a few thoughts that I learned on the job, often without warning, sometimes too late.  I should …

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What they don’t tell you at medical graduation