Medical

I looked at the door.  Standing there, in a paper gown, my hair tucked back into a ponytail, mask, and shield across my face, gloves on, boot covers over my shoes and legs.  Behind that door was a woman I had known for years, whose youngest I had delivered, whose children I still cared for. …

We are in crisis. Hospitals have become, in addition to repositories for the pandemic, infectious with moral illness. From an emergency medical physician: I have been told not to wear a mask in every room, only in rooms of people with infectious symptoms. And we are talking about [just] a surgical mask. I have emails…

We are in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s already very clear that the infection prevention community in the U.S. has never faced such an enormous challenge. Reflecting back on the past two weeks, we have learned many things that will make us better prepared for the long term. My goal is…

An adapted excerpt from Decisions: Practical Advice from 23 Men and Women Who Shaped the World. Reprinted with permission from Kensington Books. Copyright © 2020 Robert L. Dilenschneider. Count me among those who apparently didn’t get the “science gene.” In my case, the Bunsen burner in my high school lab did me in. I know…

I often hear professionals talking about “working at the top of their license” – contributing their highest skills according to their training. To overcome this pandemic, now more than ever, every single one of us will need to work and live at the top of our humanity. Patients, families, nurses, doctors, front desk staff, administrators,…

I’m a proud member of our hospital’s Jewish All-Star team, which means I work every Christmas. One great thing about working Christmas is the hospital is never full. No one wants to be hospitalized on Christmas. If patients can go home, they do, sometimes even against medical advice. On top of that, there are no…

Health care workers’ lives are not expendable. Yet, we are being asked to battle a microscopic enemy with disgracefully inadequate personal protective equipment (PPE). We know that using PAPRs (powered air-purifying respirators) would be the best practice when working with highly infectious air-borne diseases. But, PAPRs are uncommon in our institutions, so the guidelines were…

Health care workers will face some very difficult decisions in the days ahead.  The decision: Am I willing to take care of coronavirus patients without proper protection? This is a very personal dilemma. Everyone who goes into any part of medicine is there to help people. That’s what they do. They do it under very…

In cancer language, it’s not unusual for the medical or scientific meaning of a word to be different from the way the same word is understood in everyday language. Sometimes the difference reflects a focus on populations vs. individuals, and in that case, the context in which the term is used is critical. Media reports…