Perspectives:Practitioners Speak

By Kevin R. Stone, MD Arthritis is a silent, insidious, and painful joint disorder that ruins many lives. In the US, it’s the most common cause of disability. The good news is, we have learned that many cases of arthritis may be preventable. Arthritis covers many conditions. What they have in common is joint pain that can be chronic, activity limiting, and ultimately disabling. There are two main categories, inflammatory and mechanical. Arthritis, as an inflammatory disease, is characterized by inflammation of joints that leads to destruction of the bone and cartilage. This includes gout, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and fibromyalgia. Arthritis as a degenerative condition is characterized by cartilage damage as the result of an injury, or broken down over time by wear, exposing…

By Amelia L. Bueche, DO We often think something will or someone can make us feel better. When the system appears broken, the culture toxic, the space unwelcoming, we are uncomfortable. To feel more comfortable, we seek to change the surroundings and, when that seems impossible, change ourselves to fit in. We quiet our inner voices to create an external voice that joins….

By Ruchi Puri, MDLike 9/11, we have a new reference point in time. This one touches everyone on the planet personally. There is the life before Covid and there will be the life after. The days during Covid-19 are scary in a life and death sort of way. It does not matter if you get it or if you don’t. The unknowns are scary and so are the secondary consequences. Life before Covid was getting scary too. It lacked the burning sense of urgency…

By Nicole Bianchi, NCWhile we are all dealing with social distancing resulting from COVID-19, I am realizing that the desperation and angst I felt during my bout of postpartum depression nine years ago feels extraordinarily tangible once again. Depression is full of fear, isolation, relentless anxiousness and insecurity. Another quality of my depression was the idea that I was in a body I suspected might be unreliable and…

by Stephanie Wellington, MD

Medicine was my path. I’d decided that early in life before I knew what a career in medicine really looked like. I believed as a doctor I could help people and have a positive impact in their lives. After all what does a teenager really know about being a doctor.
I’m not a teenager anymore. In fact, here I am at 3 o’clock in the morning in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at the bedside of a critically ill neonate, waiting. And the weight on my shoulders is unbearable.

The medical interventions are in progress. There’s only one thing left to do. Make the call. It’s the call that I know…

By Talal Khan, MD

In the past 15 years, I have seen the corporatization of health care and a war on physician autonomy in general and primary care in particular.

Primary care physicians have been relegated to triage workers for big health systems and insurance companies. The devaluation is so extreme that in many areas of the country, they are losing out on competitive jobs to physician assistants and nurse practitioners. These physician extenders are valuable assets to the health care system but also more likely to sing the tune of the administrators and regulatory bodies…

by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin

In the course of researching and writing my book, Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery, I met scores of people who told me that they liked⁠—or even loved⁠—their jobs and their colleagues. Still, they dreaded going to work, because it was hard to think about anything except how much their backs hurt.

More than once they’d ordered expensive new equipment, hoping to find a way to get out of pain. They’d raised their desktops to standing height, only to realize…

by Erik Peper and Derek Doyle

“Fear stops action; hope initiate action.”
-Tali Sharot, PhD., author of Influential mind

Observe how you feel after you read the following two news reports:

Report 1. The graduating class at Atlanta’s historically black Morehouse College got the surprise of a lifetime on Sunday when commencement speaker and billionaire Robert F. Smith announced that he wasn’t just there to give the nearly 400 graduating seniors a nice motivational speech — he was also going to pay off their student debt.

News report 2: Gerry Dean Zaragoza, 26, is accused of fatally shooting his father and brother…

by Ruchi Puri, MD, Msc, FACOG

Escaping STRESS is like trying to escape death and taxes. Bottom line: No one escapes stress in life. Stress is an inevitability. What I find interesting is how little we address it despite Google’s 1.32 Billion search results.

The questions I kick around are: What happens in me when I have it? Why is it different for each of us? Does it happen to me or do I do it to myself? What do I do about it? To be honest, my list of questions is much longer but this is a stressful enough start.

Stress is a big deal because there comes a point…

by Jason Linder, LMFT
A DACA Primer
Many therapists are unfamiliar with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and have little experience serving clients and families with DACA status. I lived in Mexico City for almost 3 years, earned my Master of Arts degree there, speak Spanish, and have worked with many immigrant families…