Medical

Coronavirus is sweeping across the world, cities are shutting down, hospitals overflowing, the economy crashing, and suddenly your cranial nerve mnemonic feels like the last thing you should be focusing on. But while the world screeches to a halt, medical students are finding themselves in an unexpected limbo, somewhere between the front lines of healthcare…

The front desk staff member who checks you in at your primary care physician’s office is 64 years old with a history of hypertension and coronary artery disease. She unexpectedly became a widower five years ago and is planning to work until the age of 68 to secure adequate retirement savings. She is worried about…

On a sticky summer day four years ago, a class of eager medical students and I harmoniously chimed the Hippocratic oath, binding us to the highest standards and code of medical ethics. As newly accepted and unassuming medical students, how could we understand the sacred nature of this rehearsed and recited ‘covenant?’ While pledging the…

As the coronavirus pandemic spreads across the country, states are mandating “stay at home” orders; and with these orders comes further social isolation for domestic violence (DV) survivors and their families. Many recent articles highlight the potential risks for DV victims “stuck at home” with their abusers as their opportunities to seek help and support…

Since graduating from medical school in 2002, I have seen a disturbing trend in the lives of doctors. For years, physicians have been squeezed from every direction. Insurance companies and hospitals are constantly fighting to remove our autonomy. The amount of paperwork we are required to produce has skyrocketed over the past 20 years, combined…

As doctors, we know how this disease progresses. We know the prognosis for patients who need to be on a ventilator. We know that if we have a cardiac arrest during the course of COVID infection, our prognosis gets much grimmer. Faced with this knowledge, how do you decide how far you are willing to…

I just lost my uncle to COVID-19. I am writing this to honor him because I cannot leave the country to travel to Canada to see him, I could not visit him in the hospital when he needed us the most, I cannot attend his funeral, and I could not tell him in person how…

Nurses are responsible for patient care. They are the ones at the bedside 24/7. There is no one who spends more time with individual patients. They are the ones most in danger in the coronavirus pandemic. The news gets grimmer every day about the inevitable surge coming across the country. Forecast of death tolls in…

We are in the midst of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The numbers are scary and changing by the day and hour. Johns Hopkins University has a real-time dashboard where you can monitor global cases. Cases in China have leveled off, while elsewhere in the world, cases are on the rise. At the time of this…