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Covid19--can we really just drop everything? #mycoviddiary
Still vigorously healthy, thank you. I sneezed once yesterday afternoon and my voice was just a wee bit gravelly. Today my nose runs when I'm out in the cold. It always does that. No exposures that I'm...
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Covid-19 why does it seem like nothing is happening? #mycoviddiary
In and around town there are people who are looking at all of the rest of us who are hand sanitizing and social distancing like we are crazy. I feel for them. They are simply trusting their own...
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PPE--personal protective equipment. How we can have enough in the era of...
We doctors are worrying about shortages of personal protective equipment. PPE is what we call it. When we see a patient with a disease that could be transmitted to others, we wear things that cover our...
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Things everybody should know about Covid-19. Plus some ideas.
Idaho has 42 cases of Covid-19 as of this morning. It feels like nothing, but that's because very few people are being tested and we are on the leading edge of the exponential growth curve. Some of us...
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Sex in the time of Covid-19
When we are all trying to avoid deadly spread of coronavirus infections, can we still have sex?This is a GREAT question. Luckily the New York City department of health has answered this and many more...
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Covid-19 and death rates--doctors know why numbers of people who have died...
This morning the total number of deaths in the US from Covid-19 was said to be 994. That sounds kind of low, since influenza has already killed 30,000 this season. In the places where coronavirus has...
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Covid-19 Quarantine: are we afraid of going back?
It is 2 weeks since Governor Brad Little of Idaho issued a statewide "stay at home" order and about 3 weeks since my little town has been staying at home because of an earlier mayor's order. The whole...
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In solidarity with people protesting the killing of George Floyd
I am not especially qualified to write on the subject of racism or the militarization of policing or how the criminal justice system perpetuates poverty and loss of opportunity based on race. I am...
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People still aren't getting it: Death counts from Covid 19 underestimate...
I have recently become aware that some people are mistakenly getting suspicious that Covid 19 death counts are an overestimate. That is probably because the numbers are awful and very hard to...
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What to do about a system that promotes police violence? Shift where the...
I've been thinking about police violence, crime, the criminal justice system and its horrors, racial barriers to success, fear and racism in general. It's been a busy few days as I've tried to educate...
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Post Covid-19 Syndrome: dying of Covid is terrible, but some people get sick...
In my present job in a low cost health clinic I don't see much acute Covid. Patients in the infectious stage of the coronavirus are dangerous to everyone they breathe on and potentially infectious...
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Covid, re-evaluated one year later.
In early March 2020 I began to write posts about Covid 19. There were few places that people could get good information that addressed the big picture and made it possible to understand what was...
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Racism, structural Racism and a wonderful speaker, Dr. Kimberly Manning
I just heard a talk by Kimberly Manning MD, Associate Professor of Medicine as well as the Associate Vice Chair of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Emory University School of Medicine, department of...
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Ivermectin for Covid--Does it work? We don't know.
Lately there has been quite a heated controversy about whether to use ivermectin for Covid-19. The FDA, a US federal agency responsible for providing unbiased information to protect people from...
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Why I haven't been writing much: climate change
What I do most and what I do best is medicine. Healthcare. So I began to write (this blog was created in 2009) as I saw the compassionate practice of medicine being threatened by a system that has...
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A little view of the climate and the other blog! And yay, Covid drugs!
I've been writing a few things about the climate at the other place, https://doctorjanicesblog.org/. Just thought I'd mirror those here. Since I last mentioned the climate in this blog, there have...
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An opinion--Love your neighbor
I've noticed that when I'm at work, I generally love my patients. I may have complaints about them, wish they would behave differently, get frustrated with their choices, but I do feel a warm...
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Poem for the New Year
Happy 2022--let it be filled with good things.And on that note, I wrote a poem. (After reading Manifesto of Encouragement by Danielle LaPorte)Even now All is not lost--even nowyour frozen pipes are...
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I broke some ribs
It was a beautiful early spring day. I was working in a little patch of native plants, clearing away some pine needles and pulling dandelions. It was pretty much perfect weed picking soil, moist with...
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Physician retirement--questions, thoughts, considerations...
I have been a practicing physician since finishing medical school in 1986. The year after that, I started my internship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital on the Osler medical service. I remember how...
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We need to talk about abortion: Roe v. Wade and its overturn
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that provided women with a legal basis for a right to get an abortion. (Full text of opinion and dissent here--pay attention to...
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Why are new drugs so expensive? The absurdly high cost of newly marketed...
In the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) there are occasionally amazingly interesting snippets of information, not long enough to be articles, written as letters. In the early June...
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Nurse Practitioner Scope of Practice and the AMA
I have been working at CHAS Health, a community clinic serving Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho for a little over 3 years now. This is a different experience for me than my prior 35 years of...
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Guess who finally got Covid?
The earliest cases of the novel coronavirus seem to have been in Hubei Province, in the city of Wuhan in China, possibly in November of 2019. The virus shares a family name with other more common...
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AI -- what it can and can't do for medicine
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been on the edge of my consciousness as a great hope for solving many of the problems in clinical medicine for maybe a decade. In 2011 IBM created a program called...
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