Category: Doctors Patients and Diseases
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The man shackled on 4 Northwest
Andria Albert Tucson, Arizona, United States Photo by Nikon Corporation on Unsplash. In one of the patient rooms tucked into the Northwest (NW) wing of the fourth floor of the hospital, there lay a particular man. Upon walking into his room, you would find nothing extraordinary about him. He is young, early thirties, with…
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White Australia: How white healthcare has affected Indigenous Australians
Brittany Suann Western Australia Rural Australia. Photo by author. Australian healthcare is among the best, and Australia boasts the eighth lowest mortality rates in the world.1 For Indigenous Australians, however, health outcomes are 2.3 times worse than for non-Indigenous Australians.1 This gap is stark and is evident in mortality rates, the life expectancy at…
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Compassion in the emergency room
Raymond Bellis Stony Brook, New York, United States Photo by JacksonDavid on Pixabay. Yet another shift in the Emergency Department—between the frenzied rush of staff, the constant pinging of monitors, and the chaotic overhead announcements, I didn’t find the environment particularly conducive to healing. But as a dedicated student in my third year…
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Once a professor…
Anthony Papagiannis Thessaloniki, Greece “Good morning, Professor.” Lake Kremasta, Greece. Photo by author. The elderly man I address by this title lies in bed, visibly weak and rather exhausted, a clean white sheet drawn up to his neck. He has been in the hospital for several days now, and the forced immobility has added…
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On becoming a disabled physician
Mel Ebeling Birmingham, Alabama, United States Hephaestus at the Forge. Sculpture by Guillaume Coustou the Younger, 1742. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen (Jastrow) on Wikimedia. Public domain. The same prominent scar blemishes each foot: beginning two inches below my big toe, it slithers along the medial aspect of my foot, making…
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Questioning immunology and the soul
Vani Ghai Pune, India Healing ulcers on the lower leg. The ulceration may have been due to varicose veins. Watercolor drawing by S. A. Sewell. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0. The long and tiring battle with COVID has stimulated modern medicine to investigate new approaches to understanding the science of immunity. It has long…
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Herbert William Page and the railway spine controversy
Jonathan DavidsonDurham, North Carolina, United States The first passenger railway journey resulted in the death of a prominent British politician.1 During the 1830s and 1840s,2 railway travel became a popular means of transport in Victorian Britain. By the 1850s, it was clear that this revolutionary advance in transportation also caused many injuries that resulted in…
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Medicine’s pandemonium of paradoxes
Fergus ShanahanDublin, Ireland “You live and breathe paradox and contradiction, but you can no moresee the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water.”– Michael Frayn (Bohr to Heisenberg), Copenhagen1 The language of medicine is loaded with misnomers, inaccuracies, and ambiguities, and is in need of reform.2 Paradoxes, on the…
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“Avoid a remedy that is worse than the disease”
Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden Hair loss in child with tinea capitis infection. CDC, 1970. Public domain. Overconfidence is an undesirable quality. It does not enhance a physician’s approach to learning, nor to changing when change is needed. How a doctor diagnoses or treats a condition today may cause future generations of physicians to wonder,…