I’m sure I frustrate the trainers – in fact, I know I frustrate the trainers to no end. But I think there’s a very fine line. I listen to their advice. I take their medical expertise very seriously. But then I also, the reason I am where I am, the reason I play the way I play, is because I push beyond normal.
I think the media can be a very positive influence by essentially holding people to task about the importance of high quality medical care. And when the media is scrutinizing you, then I think that’s a very good, positive thing for the field of medicine.
We need to accept the seemingly obvious fact that a toxic environment can make people sick and that no amount of medical intervention can protect us. The health care community must become a powerful political lobby for environmental policy and legislation.
DACA recipients risk a lot to come out of the shadows & sign up, but many will tell you the risk is worth being able to live and work in the only country they’ve ever known as home. DACA recipients serve in our military, work in Fortune 100 companies, and conduct important medical research.
The results of inequity and bias impact everything from suspension rates, to housing access, to health outcomes, to medical interventions, to job opportunity and promotions, to criminal sentencing, and even to the very safety of the water one drinks and air one breathes.
It remains to be seen the extent to which the critical needs of seniors in low income high rises, people with home medical needs and those with disabilities have been adequately planned for and met during widespread power outages. I fear the answers.
It’s so gratifying to see people face to face who get to meet the people who are giving them a fair price for their work. They can now provide medical support for their kids, give them better education and in general have a better standard of living. God knows they deserve it.
Bodily discomfort and emotional fear and attachment make the dying uncomfortable and fearful. So, to help those dying people, I think modern medical science has a lot of facilities to reduce pain, or perhaps not to reduce pain, but not to experience pain.
I think my father gave me a great reverence for medical science. He was about as opposite to the personality of House as one could imagine. He was polite and easygoing, and would have gone to great lengths to make his patients feel attended to and heard and sympathized with.
Over the years, HIV/AIDS activists and their allies have been pioneers in creating new frontiers in the medical establishment. Through their efforts, the FDA drug approval procedures were reformed so promising new therapies could reach desperate patients quicker.
I first got sick after I had my daughter, Kimberly, 21 years ago. I’d always been energetic and never had any serious medical problems. Then I got very sick with a high fever. They told me I had mononucleosis. I became pregnant right away with Sean, and after he was born, I never seemed to recover.
The downside to becoming a doctor, I think, is it’s a very long process; four years of medical school, three years of internship, two years of residency, umpteen years of specialization, and then finally you get to be what you have trained almost all your life for.
If you look at American medical fiction written by doctors, like ‘The House of God’ by Samuel Shem and ‘The Blood of Strangers’ by Frank Huyler, both have themes of cynicism and dysfunction running through them that you won’t find in ‘ER.’ You find it in ‘Scrubs,’ but because that’s a comedy, it gets away with it.
The vast majority of people who speak to me say they have had brilliant care. When they are critical, their concern tends not to be directed at the medical side but the ancillary things that surround it, such as helping patients to eat meals, cleanliness, and making sure that when patients have a problem, they are listened to.
I am deeply immersed in my medical work, and it can get very intense, but I believe that the connection and devotion is key. You can not work on diseases as devastating and deadly as Lassa and Ebola without complete trust and respect for the individuals with whom you work. My lab and colleagues are just extraordinary, and we are a family.
There is a lot of work out there to take people out of the loop in things like medical diagnosis. But if you are taking humans out of the loop, you are in danger of ending up with a very cold form of AI that really has no sense of human interest, human emotions, or human values.
In 1970, Dean Robert Ebert offered me the Chair of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. I moved to Harvard because I missed the university environment and, more particularly, the stimulating interaction with the eager, enthusiastic, and unprejudiced young minds of the students and fellows.
The literature of menopause is the saddest, the most awful, and the most medical of all genres. You’re sleepless, you’re anxious, you’re fat, you’re depressed – and the advice is always the same: take more walks, eat some kale, and drink lots of water. It didn’t help.
Even if you’re not a union member, you’ve likely benefited from the hard-fought advancements our unions spearheaded: Have you taken a sick day, received paid leave for medical reasons or vacation, or received overtime pay? Unions paved the way for all of these.
I don’t know what it’s like to be Cuban-American, but I know what it’s like to have family under Communism and to get up early in the morning and send medical supplies and try to send food and try to send money and have it intervened, and them calling and crying on the phone.
Hunger, inadequate medical care, poor housing, and inferior schools are enemies of the sense of wonder. It is easier and less expensive in the long run to prevent a loss of imagination by providing adequate nutrition, housing, medical care, and schooling than it is to try to restore that loss.
We say women have made great strides: in biology, in many areas of chemistry, in many places, women are now the majority of medical students. But when I began my career, that wasn’t the case. There were very strong stereotypes in biology and medicine.
What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it – the process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialized language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
I think that people’s resistance to vaccination isn’t going to disappear until we address some of the nonmedical reasons for that resistance and people’s discomfort and distrust of the government. That’s bigger than what most medical professionals can handle.
Being a regular in a television series, for me – if I wanted to be a cop, I woulda went to cop school. If I wanted to be a doctor, I would’ve gone to medical school. You get trapped in your normal episodic television shows, basically doing the same thing.
