Medical

This is the million-dollar question that I’ve been asked over and over again by distraught parents wanting to do right by their children. Parents want to have their children stay home so they can keep them healthy and safe. At the same time, they are worried about the far-reaching consequences of them not being in…

I recently saw a powerful video about an amazing nurse who is a foster mother to children dying of cancer. She lovingly cared for them no matter the circumstance, the difficulties, or the heartbreak that came with each and every death of one of these precious children. It broke my heart to see and hear.…

After many years of training, I have graduated from residency and am now a board-eligible general surgeon.  I was one of more than 1,000 candidates who attempted to take the American Board of Surgery (ABS) Qualifying Examination on July 16, 2020. What should have been a major milestone rapidly devolved into a nightmare, as examinees…

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a common intestinal disorder that produces distressing symptoms like abdominal pain, significant bloating, and altered bowel movements that can shuttle between diarrhea and constipation. While changing what you eat won’t cure you, an evidence-based approach called the low-FODMAP diet is the most frequently prescribed food plan to help relieve IBS…

Prevention is the best medicine. But when you’re already sick, what you really want is an effective treatment. When the level of contagion is high, and the likelihood of contracting a disease is great, you want to know that there are options available to support you when you inevitably get sick. If herd immunity is…

The ongoing COVID crisis in the U.S. has highlighted our broken heath care system. And with it, has come an opportunity to begin to fix the system. Some touted mindfulness as a panacea pre-COVID – suggesting that if clinicians reframed the situations around them, they could better cope and continue. This backward argument echoes the idea…

“As COVID-19 devastates America and the world, I hope that fundamental change to our health care system results from its horrific exposé. Without COVID-19, the pressures placed on physicians are already immense. In the age of COVID-19, these pressures are proving to be insurmountable. Being a physician is difficult, but it does not have to…

I held back my tears as I headed home that day from work. A sense of impending doom and fear of the future was clutching my heart, something like I have never experienced before. For the first time in my medical career, my mind was preoccupied with thoughts about my own safety and how it…

A lifetime ago, when we first heard of a novel virus making the rounds in China, I was added to several physician groups on Facebook. The discussion surrounding the virus was academic; the distance made it easy to be objective, speculation on how severe it was, and how widely it would spread was casual and…