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Health care executive Chris Darland discusses their article “Why remote patient monitoring needs a preventive shift.” Chris explains that remote patient monitoring is currently too reactive, functioning as a safety net that …
Proactive monitoring can prevent emergencies by catching heart signals early [PODCAST]
Everything we know about keeping people alive under pressure we learned from war. Triage was invented on a Napoleonic battlefield. Tourniquets, hemostatic dressings, damage control resuscitation, the golden hour itself. Military surgeons figured out how to stop bleeding and move casualties while the ground was still shaking, and civilian medicine inherited every lesson. The emergency department and the battlefield have always been adjacent theaters, running the same protocols under different …
Health care cyberattacks expose a critical national security failure
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Retired emergency department nurse Amy Dinaburg discusses her article “Lowercase PTSD: Why emergency staff are still hypervigilant.” Amy reflects on the relentless pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic where nurses were forced to …
Emergency nurses struggle to turn off survival mode after the pandemic [PODCAST]
“Why are you studying that? Philosophy won’t help you save lives.” If I had a dime for every time someone said this to me, I could single-handedly fund an entire class’s medical school tuition. Being a pre-medical student who majored in philosophy feels like being the only person asking “why” in a room full of people asking “how.” I have thought to myself many times that there is no balance …
Philosophy in medicine: Why doctors need to ask “why”
Once upon a time, clinicians didn’t have enough data about their patients.
To put it mildly, things have changed. Today we’re drowning in data. As a practicing emergency physician, it is a reality I see every day.
In an emergency department (ED) environment characterized by constant time pressure, staffing constraints, and high patient acuity, clinicians sometimes must wade through reams of electronic health records (EHR) data to find critical patient information that …
AI in health care data management: Curing the EHR overload
Recently, I was asked to write about my experience as a rural emergency physician in New Mexico. The timing was uncanny: I am in the final shifts of my first job out of my emergency medicine residency on the East Coast, having spent more than four years working in emergency departments across western rural New Mexico, primarily within the Indian Health Service.
Summarizing this experience concisely feels impossible. Every emergency physician …
Rural emergency medicine in New Mexico: a physician’s firsthand account
Toward the end of undergrad, I was desperate for money to support myself and feed my figurative babies, which at the time took the form of MCAT prep and medical school applications. This desperation led to some outside-the-box thinking about how to make ends meet.
One of the most out-of-character things I did was work at Williams-Sonoma. My main motivation for working there was that it was right next to a …
From Williams-Sonoma to medicine: What retail taught me about difficult patients
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 …
Alex Pretti’s death: Why politics belongs in emergency medicine
The emergency department didn’t suddenly get worse.
The numbers did.
Every shift, emergency clinicians are measured by dashboards that insist on telling a familiar story: Door-to-provider times are too long, length of stay is unacceptable, left-without-being-seen rates are creeping up. The implication is clear. We’re slow. We’re inefficient. We’re failing.
But those numbers are no longer describing clinical performance. They’re describing system saturation.
Emergency departments today operate in conditions that were once considered temporary …
Emergency department metrics vs. reality: Why the numbers lie
An excerpt from 99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them.
In response to this chapter, I expect to receive a battery of soaking wet letters from infuriated marine biologists, since each species deserves their own chapter, but my editor cut me off.
Flamboyant cuttlefish
The flamboyant cuttlefish is not to be confused with the flamboyant cuddle-fish, which does not exist. The cuttlefish, Metasepia pfefferi, looks like an orchid that ran …
The most venomous sea creatures to avoid
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Emergency physician Kenneth Ro discusses his article “Why midlife men feel unanchored and exhausted.” Kenneth explains why men between 40 and 60 often visit clinics requesting hormone testing when they are actually …
Why midlife men feel lost and exhausted [PODCAST]
The cabin was quiet in that familiar, suspended way airplanes always are with a steady engine hum, passengers absorbed in movies, sleep, and anticipation with the intermittent crying child. It was an ordinary flight. Until it wasn’t. The overhead speaker crackled without warning. “If there is a doctor on board, please identify yourself.”
The voice was calm. The effect was not. Just a row behind me, a child no more than …
In-flight medical emergencies: Are planes prepared?
It was past 7 p.m. when I finally reached home after another long day in the outpatient oncology clinic. My mind still echoed with the day’s stories: patients fighting pain, families clinging to hope, and the small victories that made the exhaustion feel almost worthwhile. There was emotional fatigue, but also peace.
Then I opened WhatsApp. The headline jolted me: “Doctor in Chennai stabbed by patient’s son after mother’s death.” He …
Violence against physicians and the role of empathy
Standing in the middle of the parking lot of the Berkeley 2000 Recreation Center in February 2021, Molly Humphreys, in a single frame, captures an important moment in the public’s collective health, though it can be easily missed if we don’t pause and absorb its significance. In the chaos of 2025, it would be careless to not linger on this image.
A masked …
Why we can’t forget public health
I work as an emergency physician in the emergency department at a Level 1 trauma center. Because time is of the essence, when we get a trauma into the ED, they are automatically deemed a Doe – John or Jane. Due to the number of traumas we see at our trauma center in a given year, another word gets added to the Doe to make them easier to identify. It …
The emotional toll of trauma care
Let’s be honest. Most frontline clinicians don’t wake up worrying about CDC updates. They’re worrying about whether the ED has enough staff, or whether the patient they discharge will receive the follow-up care they need.
So when another vaccine recommendation or public policy update drops, often contradicting the last, it’s no wonder people roll their eyes. The problem isn’t that clinicians don’t care about public health; it’s that the messaging often …
Physician leadership communication tips
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Emergency physician Resa E. Lewiss and health care executive Jake Horowitz discuss their article, “Why women ER doctors earn $21,000 less than men.” They reveal staggering new data that shatters the myth …
New data reveals the massive pay gap for women ER doctors [PODCAST]
When Americans decide something is right, political inertia does not prevent us from acting, and now is the time for health care. Before the Affordable Care Act (ACA), 60 percent of Americans had employer-sponsored coverage, 20 percent relied on public programs, and the remaining 20 percent had to obtain insurance on their own, a difficult task because the individual market was unsustainable. But the ACA stabilized these issues by expanding …
Why extending ACA subsidies is crucial for health care access
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Pediatric emergency medicine physician Bronwen Carroll discusses her article, “The childhood risk we never talk about.” Bronwen explains the staggering data showing child sexual abuse is far more common than many other …
How to prevent child sexual abuse [PODCAST]
On July 6, 2025, in Nanjing, China, a construction worker plunged onto a steel rod that pierced him from pelvis to chest. That night, doctors fought millimeter by millimeter through a five-hour battle against death.
The call at midnight
The phone’s shriek tore through the heavy summer silence just after midnight.
Professor Ji Zhenling, president of Nanjing Jiangbei Hospital, surfaced from sleep, the warmth of his pillowcase still pressed against his cheek. His …
The night of an impalement injury surgery
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