Giannina L. Garces-Ambrossi Muncey is a critical care physician.

The political backlash to evidence-based doctors’ recommendations

Conditions
August 12, 2021

Last week, someone referred to me online in the most shocking terms: a liberal. As I read the phrase, I gripped the pearls around my neck and coughed down my scalding afternoon tea. How could this have happened to me?

With all its newsworthiness to the public, last week was still an ordinary one in the intellectual life of a doctor: Read journal articles, understand new guidelines, disseminate via recommendations. By …

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The political backlash to evidence-based doctors’ recommendations

Stop dog-whistling the CDC

Physician
May 23, 2021

A beautiful woman, all mocha skin and glimmering eyeshadow, turned to me in Whole Foods and whispered: “I like your style.”

I was alternately baffled and proud: Take that, lifetime of scrubs! Mama’s still got it. Then I looked down at myself and saw I was wearing jeans with Paw Patrol stickers on them.

She pointed one perfectly manicured finger to her face: we were indoors, yet I saw her French red …

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Stop dog-whistling the CDC

No, I won’t play politics. I’m a doctor.

Physician
August 7, 2020

Sneeze, and you miss it: the public’s love for health care workers. This relationship has felt like a true Coronacoaster.

Pre-COVID: physicians were disparaged for the sins of insurers and hospital C-suites.

COVID appears: I was gifted a yard full of signage announcing “Heroes Live Here.”

COVID escalates: the World Health Organization is …  defunded?

We’re held in high suspicion, yet …

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No, I won’t play politics. I’m a doctor.

To all the mom-shamers out there: Let’s demand the collective support we, our children, and our society need

Physician
July 22, 2020

How I long for the good old days of mom-shaming.

Back then, you could tsk-tsk over any number of maternal decisions: breastfeeding or bottle-feeding; having children out of wedlock or in wedlock with another woman; staying at home, or working full time.

Nowadays, all that remains is: How she plans to educate her children this Fall.

We vilify women planning pandemic e-learning, asking them, “What planet are you on,” “Don’t you have anything …

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To all the mom-shamers out there: Let’s demand the collective support we, our children, and our society need

Where on earth have everyone’s manners gone?

Physician
July 15, 2020

There comes a day in every woman’s life when she must wonder: Where on earth have everyone’s manners gone?

This phase of life, I once believed, was the same phase when I would shout things like:

“You kids get off my lawn!”

“Oh, it’s just a touch of gout!”

And so on.

Is it my own grand-millennial style, wherein I scour vintage Etsy finds (and insist on living in a 100-year-old house), that awakens my …

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Where on earth have everyone’s manners gone?

Heroism is a process for physicians

Conditions
March 29, 2020

Was everyone in medical school as young, innocent, and wildly stupid as we were? The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine required superlatives: most, best, fastest … dumbest?

Before each test, my friend Frank and I would scroll through our mental Rolodexes of “What are our other options?” (As opposed to being stuck inside with Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple.) I preferred the morbid: Eating so many McDonald’s cheeseburgers, we gave …

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Heroism is a process for physicians

Your greatest role as a doctor? Storyteller.

Physician
October 25, 2018

There are medical honors so rare you don’t even know they exist. When you’re trudging through the slog of PBK/AOA/other — ultimately meaningless — letters, these seem to be the definition of distinction. Just like every other lesson, a patient taught me what real prestige is.

Well, it wasn’t entirely that Oslerian, it was the patient’s nephew.*

Carl paged me on an ordinary day — a fellow physician, he once saved my …

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Your greatest role as a doctor? Storyteller.