Alex Pretti’s death: Why politics belongs in emergency medicine
Emergency medicine trains clinicians to recognize patterns early, anticipate deterioration, and intervene before outcomes become irreversible. We pride ourselves on seeing what others miss. Yet we are repeatedly instructed, explicitly or implicitly, to ignore the largest pattern of all. Political decisions consistently and predictably shape who arrives in our emergency departments, how sick they are, and how unsafe the environment becomes for the people expected to care for them.
If political …
