Medical

This essay is for my colleagues. When I say “colleagues,” I am referring to all health care workers who are currently working on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis or are engaging in patient care at any level. This might be an unconventional essay coming from a doctor, but I wanted to send out my…

Making sure that teens stay away from their friends during the COVID-19 pandemic is not always easy — for reasons that are not really their fault. They are in absolutely the worst developmental stage for this, because They are naturally and appropriately seeking independence, which often includes defiance. The frontal lobe of the brain is…

You always knew they didn’t care about you.  The administration, I mean.  But you knew that going into it.  It’s just four years that you have to endure until you can be respected, until you make the big bucks, until you’re treated like a human being.  Four years is not that long. But you knew…

When coronavirus exploded, my family was on vacation in Colorado. We played the news nonstop, and it was frightening. I’m a control freak, a planner, and thus my worries were nonstop. What were other hospitals doing to prepare as compared to my own? What were the plans to ration PPE? How was the morale at…

Everything feels like it’s happening out of a movie, mostly because we’ve all seen it before. Pandemic, Outbreak, even World War Z. It has never felt real, until it became real. It became real when all of my friends from my pediatrics residency in New York became adult doctors, figuring out how to ventilate a…

Viruses typically invade our bodies through an opening. Think gastrointestinal flu, COVID-19, AIDS. Our bones, however, are normally protected from any outside exposure, so they should be safe, right? The short answer is yes and no. Of course, knowledge is power, and we need both right now, so here is a nuanced answer. Patients with smallpox frequently…

With more people staying at home these days, there’s more opportunity to prepare homemade meals. Although home-cooked meals tend to be much lower in salt than what you’d get from a restaurant, you still need to be careful, says Liz Moore, a dietitian at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). Why worry about salt?…

I packed my bags to head home for spring break, excited for a week with family and friends—a rare opportunity to recharge during the first year of medical school. I headed straight to the airport after my neurology exam at the beginning of March, not realizing that the short week at home I had originally…

There is an old adage within the black community that says, “When White America catches a cold, Black America has pneumonia.” African American patients with COVID-19 are dying at a significantly higher rate compared to other races. These statistics are currently reported within the state of Louisiana and cities of Chicago and Milwaukee. At the…