We have all seen the memes and picture frames on social media. I can’t stay home – I am a health care worker.
I am a health care worker.
But I have been mostly home the past eight weeks, and the thought of returning to the office full-time has left me grappling with anxiety and fear.
As a nurse practitioner in dermatology, I have had the luxury of dramatically changing the way I …
I can’t stay home. I am a health care worker.
Doctors across America are getting strikingly similar messages from their hospital administrators—that we are highly valued, but that they will reduce our salaries due to the pandemic. Whether you are working on the frontline and risking your life (and your family’s health) with limited PPE available (and indeed locked up and rationed), or whether you are soldiering on in the outpatient clinics. Your salary is going down, whether you signed …
About your salary: We value you
Since COVID-19, the way that we practice medicine has changed. Every patient we see, test we order, and treatment we prescribe is under closer scrutiny. Direct patient interaction has been cut to the bare minimum. This has proved to be a challenge in many ways, forcing us to adapt to a new model of medicine. Counterintuitively, this model may lead to better training, utilization of testing, and increased access to …
Extending lessons learned to a post pandemic world
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In the film Silver Linings Playbook, the protagonist Pat struggles to control his bipolar disorder, which triggers violent outbursts leading to hospitalization in a locked psychiatric unit. Upon discharge, Pat commits to a new outlook on life, embodied by the Latin word “Excelsior”—”ever upward.” Emboldened by this new mantra, he endeavors to reframe crises as opportunities … or silver linings. His psychiatrist cautions that attitude alone is an incomplete solution: …
The Silver Linings Playbook for COVID-19
COVID-19 has made the inadequacy of our public health and hospital-based health care system to identify, mitigate, and resolve pandemic disaster self-evident. Gaps in hospital-based preparedness capacity are abundant, including the inadequacy of stockpiles for personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, medications, lack of surge inpatient and ICU capacity, and an inability to rapidly scale testing or interventions to meet pandemic demands.
The initial outcry placed blame on Federal and State governments, …
Hospital-based preparedness in the post-COVID era
The coronavirus has taken a major toll on virtually all aspects of our lives, especially for those of us who live in urban areas. As many others have rightfully pointed out, the dangers of the disease extend well beyond the physical complications caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The virus has also sent a psychological shockwave around the globe, and even those who have not become sick have felt the burden …
The widowhood effect and COVID-19: What seniors need to know
Spring 2020 has brought a disproportionate amount of grief for many of us. The losses include mortal ones, such as the death of a loved one, a colleague, or a patient. We’ve lost productivity, opportunities, and income. We’ve also lost freedoms, from the personal liberty to go where we please to our ability to spend time alone (due to quarantine in close quarters with family members). And as an anesthesiologist, …
An unintended consequence of COVID universal masking
The scene is becoming far too familiar for so many of us. Hours and days in meetings, struggling to stay relevant in this new virtual workplace. Earphones anchored in, skillfully planning the “unmute” to avoid transmitting the sounds of screaming children. Simultaneously, trying to make meals and do dishes while having an iPad shoved in your face to help with “new school” math homework. Toddlers tugging at shirt sleeves, …
COVID-19 will set female leaders in STEM back for years
Imagine answering a call from an unknown number. A stranger announces you may have been exposed to coronavirus; you may or may not get seriously ill, and either way, you have to isolate yourself for two weeks while everyone else carries on. What goes through your mind? Are you scared? Who will take care of the kids? Will your boss give you sick leave if you feel healthy? Wouldn’t it …
How to make COVID-19 contact tracing work
I am a physician that was placed in a unique position. I was hired as a private contractor to work for three months in a remote medical setting on Wake Island.
Wake Island is a remote island approximately 2000 miles west of Hawaii, with a population of 150+ people.
Wake Island is unique in that it is a mid-Pacific refueling stop for military aircraft. …
A physician and her COVID-free island
Since 2008, after embarking as a full-time entrepreneur, my career has been a series of peaks and valleys. By 2016, I had achieved FIRE status in my mid-thirties by investing in residual income-producing investments, including real estate and equities.
As a result, I was able to take a year-off sabbatical to contemplate my next career move. In 2017, I then started my consulting company to reach more people and make a …
How COVID-19 forced me to pivot and accelerated my business growth
Before the world was crippled by the spread of COVID-19, physician burnout was already taking an alarming toll on our health care system. Physicians were working more hours, more days, in high-pressure circumstances with excessive charting requirements and administrative burdens, on too little rest with too few healthy stress-relief outlets.
Flash forward to the last four months: unfathomable circumstances of inadequate PPE, short-staffed hospitals, overloaded emergency rooms, and very sick patients …
Providing clinician support in times of calm and chaos
In early February, I was on my family medicine rotation. This was around Chinese New Year, when many East Asians travel extensively. The hospital I worked in serves a large Chinese community, and rumors about a new pneumonia emerging out of Wuhan, China were spurring patients to seek our reassurance that they didn’t have it. One patient thought their stuffy nose might be ominous, while another was worried about a …
The trouble with medical experts
I am a female surgical resident. I signed up for this. I chose four years of medical school, five years of residency, two years of research, a year of fellowship, and finally attending surgeon life. I’d choose it again.
And I want this road to be hard. I want my training so tough that I don’t wonder while a patient’s on the table if I’m good enough. I want to know …
Maternity leave in a post-COVID world
I am an ICU nurse. I love what I do; It’s not just a career: It’s who I am. No other job could offer me the intimate opportunity to support and guide a total stranger through the worst (and occasionally best) days of their life. Nowhere else would I leave feeling humbled by what I do every day. Nothing compares to that. Simply put: You don’t find that sense of …
I am an ICU nurse. We are drowning.
Dr. Lorna Breen, who died by suicide on April 26, was the canary in the coal mine. You can see it in her eyes, and in her smile. I didn’t know her, but I’ll bet she sang. One of her causes was successful communication with autistic patients, something beyond most emergency physicians.
She was a leader in a profession and a specialty already reeling under the occupational …
Lorna Breen was the quintessential canary in the coal mine
The United States has been the most impacted country in the current COVID-19 crisis.
Is COVID, the only common denominator? What else is common to the over 100,000 deaths in the United States, who is collecting and analyzing the death data comprehensively apart from the snapshot of admission and discharge diagnosis from death certificates?
Out of the deaths so far, how many were children, healthy adults, pregnant women, long term facility residents, …
How did coronavirus become so widespread? By the time Dr. Zhang Jixian first reported the cases, it is thought that 180 patients were already infected.
The problem with this is that SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, COVID-19, presents in many different ways and spreads in patients with no symptoms. By the time we were even able to identify that a novel virus was infecting humans, it was already too late. …
Coronavirus is an elusive enigma
Much has been written about the response of the governmental agencies in the foreseeability of COVID-19 spread and management in the United States. Travel restriction from mainland China seemed to be a very timely intervention. However, instead of considering it as an initial step in a prolonged exercise of vigilance in preventing the disease from getting a foothold on the continent, it was considered the only one. Now it is …
The economics of primary care in a COVID-19 world
To contain COVID-19 and re-open the economy, the U.S. should be performing 500,000 tests per day. We are nowhere near that number.
Widespread implementation of CRISPR-based testing would address deficits in the current testing landscape. The most common method of testing for COVID-19—reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR)—costs $100 per test, takes four-six hours to run, involves Read more…
How CRISPR technology can solve our COVID-19 testing problems
