Medical

Now more than ever, children and adolescents need to continue receiving routine well-child visits and regularly scheduled immunizations. From the earliest onset of the COVID19 pandemic, there has been a significant decrease in the number of preventive health visits to clinical practices. Unfortunately, this new reality has led to many patients missing important immunizations and delaying critical developmental…

In a market economy, business leaders take every opportunity to shrink the cost line of labor on the balance sheet to boost profits and shareholder/investor value. It’s the metric on which they are evaluated, and left unopposed; they will do it more and more. The core strategy for shrinking labor costs (along with automation and…

No matter who pulls the plug, divorce sucks. It does get better, and eventually, you get to a new normal — but the process sucks. I know this because our two-physician marriage ended 15 years ago when our daughters were six and seven years old. Divorce can be especially hard on physicians, and during these…

As hospitals everywhere have been using every health care provider available to them in response to COVID-19, the specialty of hospital medicine has shown itself to be uniquely suited for coordinating the effort, to be the front of the frontline responders. I suspect that many people don’t understand what “hospital medicine” is, even though it’s…

  “Faced with the prospect of not being able to provide all COVID-19 patients with the life support that they may need, physicians and nurses are working in conditions that have been described as ‘hell.’ How are providers to cope with the trauma they are experiencing in New York and Italy, and presumably other nations…

Standing in the hallway, I look attentively to the computer screen while the attending skims the records. “This is a longstanding patient of mine.  I’m just going to have you listen while we do a visit with our psychologist,” he says. With the paucity of chairs, I stand. I wondered if it would add an…

Fibroids are generally benign (not cancerous) tumors that form within the tissues of the uterus. They are very common in reproductive-age women: studies report that up to 70% of white women and 80% of Black women may develop fibroids by age 50. And research suggests Black women are more likely to experience severe or very…

“After almost 30 years in this profession, I have come to the conclusion that there is some truth to that, as no day or week passes that I do not have a depressed, anxious or suicidal teen on my ‘to see list.’ Could it be my own personal history of depression and suicidal ideation? Could…