Physician

As I held the shaky, sweaty hand of my 52-year-old African American patient, lying in her ICU bed, trembling with fear, tears rolling down her eyes, she gathered enough strength to utter “I can’t breathe.” Her words felt like a punch in my gut, eliciting a visceral reaction, with flashes of George Floyd’s body pinned to the ground, running through my mind. The events of the last few weeks had given ...

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Primary care is at the heart of each and every health care system. Effective and efficient primary care leads to positive health outcomes across the board, most notably lower rates of mortality and hospitalization, and higher life expectancy. But to achieve such results, primary care needs an integrated system to support efficient care delivery. Despite the diligent work performed every minute by doctors, nurses, and other clinicians, ...

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It’s 4:30 a.m. as I trudge to the parking garage with a sense of defeat. I am an internal medicine resident wrapping up a swing shift, the magnanimous buffer to admission responsibilities between the day and overnight ward teams. Though clinically tucking in patients that arrive before six o’clock is often easily accomplished well before midnight, this time had been different. Not two hours into the shift, I reached my ...

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A guest column by the American College of Physicians, exclusive to KevinMD. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the signs have been everywhere – celebrating the heroism of health care workers. It's a wonderful sentiment that as a physician personally makes me feel very good about our profession and what we do. It's also ...

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Like a lot of doctors my age, I was too busy to have checkups, working 60 hours a week plus night and weekend call. But that all changed in 2013 when at age 67, my dentist felt a submental lymph node. A CBC had 35,000 white cells, and I had chronic lymphocytic leukemia. When I told my wife that patients with CLL live a long time and die of something ...

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I know you don't know me, but I feel like I know you from your transparency and radical honesty in all of your public communications. I know that you speak truth to bullsh*t while remaining civil. I know that you are more than aware of the lack of adequate mental health services across the nation. I know you see the catastrophic toll medicine takes on the mental health needs of ...

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Seven years ago, I took a hot yoga class in a packed studio, an R&B playlist bumping loudly, the woman next to me sporadically singing along with the music. Afterward, she smiled at me and said, “It was nice to practice with you!” I was new to yoga, and this was the first time I considered yoga as a practice, a word signifying a skill performed repeatedly in order to ...

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On May 25, 2020, the world was already reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic with a lockdown with no end in sight, when a video taken on a bystander’s cellphone went viral of a man being arrested by several police officers, put on the road in a prone position and one officer kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes, even after he lost consciousness and posed no threat to anyone. Unfortunately, ...

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Two-paged signouts This was the picture of the unusually higher than normal patient load we have in the wards. The hospital looked grim and eerie. Gone were the days when we would start with morning report and see plastered smiles on colleagues’ faces, relaxed and ready to conquer the day. I saw patients without visitors. I’d hear rapid response teams more frequently – so I made a habit of memorizing ...

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