Medicine Out of Context
I ducked into the ladies’ room at La Guardia Airport in New York for a pitstop before boarding my flight. Inside I encountered a housekeeper washing the floors. She flashed me a broad smile.
“Doctora,” she said, and then hesitated. I could see that she was waiting for a response. “Recuerdame?” More
Maladies, Remedies, and Anthologies: Medicine Taken at Its Word
The urge to anthologize seems to be one of those primordial drives, nestled in our genomes alongside the compulsions to eat heartily, imbibe lustily, and slaughter enemies willfully. Or at least that’s how the Greeks appear to have experienced it. More
Chekhov and Public Health
At first glance, it might seem odd that a public health journal would initiate a section about arts and humanities. Public health, after all, deals with populations; it eschews the individual except as it forms one of a group. The creative arts, however, deal almost exclusively with individuals. Literature, in particular, always has a protagonist, and the protagonist is never ‘alcoholics with pancreatitis,’ ‘female prisoners receiving hepatitis B vaccination,’ ‘South Asians with cardiovascular risk factors,’ ‘UK asylum seekers with infectious disease,’ or ‘teenaged asthmatic smokers.’ A protagonist is an individual.
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Merced
“This is a case of a 23 year-old Hispanic female…†The speaker droned on with the details of the case that I knew so well. I leaned back in my chair, anticipating and savoring the accolades that were going to come. After all, in a roundabout way, I’d made the diagnosis. I was the one who had the idea to send the Lyme test in the first place. More
A Day in the Clinic
8:30 a.m. Doing intakes—interviews with new patients to the clinic. First one is Carola Castaña, a petite thirty-five-year-old Brazilian who immigrated to the United States three months ago. She folds her hands in her lap as I begin to take her history. She understands my questions better if I ask in Spanish rather than English, but her Portuguese replies are Greek to me, so she struggles to answer in English. More
Voice Mail: Blessing and Curse
Voice mail is both a blessing and a curse. When we were first given voice mail in our clinic, it was a revolution–patients could actually get in contact with their doctors. But sometimes voice mail is a ball and chain. More
Rx: Writing
Writing has always been a prominent part of medicine. Doctors write “histories†of their patients all the time. Increasingly there has been interest in writing by patients. More
Meet Dr. Chan….
“Dr. Chan and Mrs. Geng eased out of their chairs in the waiting room using their matching wooden canes, the kind distributed by the hospital, free of charge. At 89, Dr. Chan was stooped and frail, his body paper-thin. He seemed as though he might topple over from the breeze generated by the opening and … More
The Debilitated Muse
Poetry is a supremely sensory art, both in the imagining and in the writing. What happens when the poet faces illness? How is the poetry affected by alterations of the body and mind. More
ERs for Primary Care
George Bush once famously (or infamously) commented that health care is indeed available for all: You just go to the emergency room. More
Social Mission of Med Schools
What exactly is the mission of a medical school? Is it to train the best and smartest doctors? Is to tend to our nation’s health? Is it to further medical knowledge? More
Palliative Care: From the Get-Go
The scientific world finally produced the data to support what seems so obvious: Palliative care belongs in the beginning of cancer treatment, not just at the end. More
The Patient’s Voice
Not long ago I learned that these side effects listed on the package insert are not the ones the patient actually complains of. No, they are the symptoms the patients’ doctors choose to report, the doctors’ impressions of what the patients are describing. More
Endorphins and Overeating
As a primary care internist, my practice spans the common adult ailments—diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, coronary artery disease, arthritis. It is hard not to avoid the difficult truth that obesity, while perhaps not causing all of these illness, certainly exacerbates them greatly. More
Owning Up to Medical Error
Precisely two weeks after completing my medical internship,I proceeded to nearly kill a patient. July marked the startof my second year of residency at New York City’s BellevueHospital, and it was my first time being fully in charge of a patient. More
