Opinion | The Straw-Man Argument Against California’s COVID Misinfo Law
Sawyer is an emergency medicine doctor. An article in the South Carolina Post and Courier in early 2022 recounts how a patient levied grave accusations against his physician. The doctor was accused of persistently trivializing the dangers of COVID, recommending hydroxychloroquine as treatment, and purportedly alleging that the vaccines were concocted as a sinister plot […]
The 7 Biggest Early Warning Signs You’re Developing Depression
If you’re reading this article, then you’re likely concerned that you or a loved one may be exhibiting symptoms of depression. It’s not an isolated experience: Mental health issues have been on the rise, especially since the onset of the pandemic. While depression affects each person differently, there are some common hallmark characteristics ― and […]
Opinion | Emergency Doctors Are Ill Prepared to Handle Psychiatric Emergencies
More than four decades ago, an article appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry defining the subspecialty of emergency psychiatry (EP). Since those early days, despite some research and consolidation into a new association complementing emergency medicine (EM), the impact on meaningful access to, integration with, and quality of care for psychiatric emergencies has been […]
Why Medicaid Could Be The Next Program Republicans Try To Cut
This article is part of HuffPost’s biweekly politics newsletter. Click here to subscribe. It was a pretty big deal on Tuesday night, at the State of the Union, when President Joe Biden got Republicans to promise they wouldn’t cut Medicare or Social Security. It’s not clear how binding that promise is or whether it even […]
Opinion | Should Health Professionals Teetotal?
I recently published the article “Avoid ‘Shots in the Dark’ to Maintain Pristine Professional Boundaries” in Psychiatric Times to demonstrate how drinking alcohol in public may lead well-meaning licensed health professionals onto the slippery slope of boundary violations and costly career jeopardy. Across the U.S., millions of doctors, nurses, and other licensed health professionals are […]
This Is What A Real Agenda On Mental Health Would Look Like
This article is part of HuffPost’s biweekly politics newsletter. Click here to subscribe. Outbursts of gun violence always get Republicans talking about mental health. It would be a lot easier to take that talk seriously if so many of them didn’t have lengthy, well-publicized records of opposing government initiatives to improve mental health care. Texas […]
Opinion | Contemplating Death Taught Me How to Live
Trigger warning: This article discusses suicidal ideation. Please use your best judgment in reading. I am sharing my journey with caution in hopes that my reflection will help others. I am no stranger to existential crises. The moments where I realize my mortality and have a mild panic about when and how I may die. […]
A new rapid assessment to promote climate-informed conservation and nature-based solutions
A new article, published as a Perspective in the journal Conservation Science and Practice, introduces a rapid assessment framework that can be used as a guide to make conservation and nature-based solutions more robust to future climate. Climate change poses risks to conservation efforts, if practitioners assume a future climate similar to the past or […]
Clinical Challenge: Test Your Knowledge on Atopic Dermatitis
The following quiz tests one aspect from each article in a three-part MedPage Today Clinical Challenges series on atopic dermatitis (AD), including: chronic itch, managing mental health in patients with eczema, and managing sleep disturbancesleep disturbance related to AD. Correct answers and explanations will appear after completing the quiz. Last Updated August 13, 2021 Kristin […]
COVID-19 test offers solution for population-wide testing, scientists say: More than 80,000 tests done in under two months
In an article appearing in Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team of scientists from the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and UCLA School of Engineering report real-world results on SwabSeq, a high-throughput testing platform that uses sequencing to test thousands of samples at a time to detect COVID-19. They were able to perform more than […]