Category: Doctors Patients and Diseases
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“You will be alright”
Swetha KannanAjman, United Arab Emirates “Will my daughter be alright?” asked the anxious mother, trying to hold back her tears. A young girl in her early twenties, so petite and frail that her body seemed to be like a sole pearl in a large sea. Her worrisome eyes met mine, screaming the same question—“Will I…
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Wounded healer
Brandon MuncanStony Brook, New York Since Plato, the notion of a sufferer helping the suffering has been proposed as one of the more skillful ways of helping a patient through an illness.1 Although this concept has been discussed since the time of Athenian philosophy, the term “wounded healer” itself was only coined in 1951 by…
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The man shackled on 4 Northwest
Andria AlbertTucson, Arizona, United States 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 a head full of curly brown hair and…
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White Australia: How white healthcare has affected Indigenous Australians
Brittany SuannWestern Australia 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 birth being 69.7 years for Indigenous women…
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Compassion in the emergency room
Raymond BellisStony Brook, New York, United States 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 of medical school, I eagerly picked up a…
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Once a professor…
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece “Good morning, Professor.” 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 its toll to the medical problems he has…
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On becoming a disabled physician
Mel EbelingBirmingham, Alabama, United States The same prominent scar blemishes each foot: beginning two inches below my big toe, it slithers along the medial aspect of my foot, making a hairpin turn around my ankle before coming to an abrupt halt on the opposite side, two inches below my pinky toe. I have bilateral congenital…
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Questioning immunology and the soul
Vani GhaiPune, India The long and tiring battle with COVID has stimulated modern medicine to investigate new approaches to understanding the science of immunity. It has long been apparent that immune systems exist almost ubiquitously across the living and that all diseases involve the immune system. But even though immunology plays a decisive role in…