Sami El-Dalati is an infectious disease physician. 

When your letter to the editor is rejected or ignored

Physician
November 30, 2022

Dear Dr. El-Dalati,

I am sorry that we will not be able to publish your recent letter to the editor regarding the Chowdhury article of 16-Sep-2021.  The space available for correspondence is very limited, and we must use our judgment to present a representative selection of the material received.  Many worthwhile communications must be declined for lack of space.

The response from The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) seemed simple and …

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When your letter to the editor is rejected or ignored

Who could understand what it’s like to tell someone their loved one is dying? 

Physician
October 4, 2020

I sat outside my patient’s ICU room, my eyes glancing from his chart to him and his wife.  The picture was grim.  My patient, Tom, was a 56-year-old man, severely ill from decompensated cirrhosis, was admitted for the third time in a month with hypothermia from sepsis.  Despite antibiotic therapy, he was not improving.  Now his kidneys were failing from hepato-renal syndrome with a combined liver-kidney transplant, the only hope …

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Who could understand what it’s like to tell someone their loved one is dying? 

It is OK to be scared, but it is not OK to let our own anxieties harm our patients

Conditions
April 27, 2020

“Our current guidelines from the hospital and our national societies are if the patient is not at risk for a major cardiac event in the next week we should defer surgery.”  The words hang in the now virtual air of the hospital’s weekly multidisciplinary endocarditis conference.  The young woman whose case we are discussing has bacteremia with two different organisms and a very large infectious mass on one of her …

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It is OK to be scared, but it is not OK to let our own anxieties harm our patients