Medical

For thousands of years, bonesetters and doctors could not accurately diagnosis broken bones or differentiate such injuries from joint dislocations and torn ligaments. That changed with a chance discovery almost exactly 125 years ago. Subsequently, perhaps with equal parts of chagrin and enlightenment, doctors began using the new discovery to discount their previous assumptions and…

Primum non nocere, or “first, do no harm,” is a fundamental principle in the practice of medicine. Physicians vow to do as much when taking the Hippocratic Oath on their first day of medical school. But where does the buck stop?  I posit that we in the medical community harm patients when we fail to…

In the middle of a busy week of balancing clinical, research, educational, administrative, and parental responsibilities, I receive an email request from a prominent journal to review a manuscript. If I agree, I will spend a couple of hours reading the manuscript, offering comments, and registering my opinion. Several weeks later, I’ll probably be asked…

It’s well known that New York City was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring, having been the epicenter of U.S. cases for several weeks. As I write this, more than 245,000 of my fellow New Yorkers have been stricken, and an estimated one in ten of them have died. In fact, the…

“There are some things that we are living through as a result of COVID-19 that I did not imagine in my fictional account. For example: the timeline. As we are now four full months into this pandemic in the U.S., some experts estimate that we are still early in the game. As one doctor put…

J.T. is a general internist who completed residency in Atlanta early in the AIDS era. His daughter, R.T., is a third-year internal medicine-pediatrics resident in Los Angeles, and his daughter, D.T., is a second-year OB/GYN resident in Philadelphia. They describe and compare their experiences as residents during a pandemic. Contexts of the pandemic eras J.T.:…

“Aunty blew her brains out a few weeks ago!” Words I shall never forget. For weeks, she had been in my thoughts. But I never called her. I didn’t because of all the myriad reasons we often give ourselves for not checking up on each other. In my case, they sounded like this; “I am…

During the final presidential debate, Joe Biden said that “no one should be going to jail for a drug problem, they should be going to rehabilitation,” effectively suggesting that substance use be decriminalized in the US. The war on drugs Since President Nixon declared the “war on drugs” nearly half a century ago, the general…