Making Sense of the First Trust COVID-19 Tracker

Those 712,930 people who we have lost to the virus all represented lives cut short; live full of purpose, filled with people who loved them. Yes, a disproportionate number of those who have died were elderly, and a disproportionate number of the younger people died had chronic illnesses or disabilities. If you’re here to make…

Dr. Dan Stock’s Rapid-Fire Misinformation at the Mt. Vernon Community School Corporation

We have now given 352 million COVID-19 vaccine doses in the US alone and over 4 billion doses worldwide, and there is still no evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines cause antibody-dependent or antibody-mediated enhancement. The entire course of the pandemic shows exactly the opposite; those who have the vaccine get less sick, less often, and…

The Massachusetts Outbreak is More Proof that the COVID-19 Vaccines Work.

Right now, hospitals all over the country are drowning in almost entirely unvaccinated COVID-19 cases that are absolutely overwhelming our medical infrastructure, and many of those patients are dying tragically. The Barnstable outbreak is indeed a warning about just how contagious the Delta variant really is. But it also shows us how much better off…

Why Would Any Black American Trust These New Vaccines?

Black Americans face a double-edged sword. Longstanding healthcare inequities and neglect of Black healthcare needs places Black communities in a position of heightened vulnerability to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the racist history of medical research abuse rightfully increases the wariness many already feel about the new vaccines, our best protection against it. Thankfully, Black Physicians,…

Dr. Simone Gold and the “Experimental Vaccines”

At 23:53 Dr. Gold says, “mRNA technology has never ever been used before for vaccines,” and just 35 seconds later, she says “There’s been a tremendous failure of previous Coronavirus vaccines.” Previous failures… New technology… Didn’t Dr. Gold just give us hope that this time things will be different? I would have phrased it this…

COVID-19 and Bell’s Palsy: I wish she was my patient.

These vaccines are the best hope we have of ending the pandemic. I believe in them. They are safe, and your chances of developing a significant reaction- including Bell’s Palsy- is incredibly low. I absolutely disagree that these vaccines are “the worst thing ever”. She is very understandably thinking about her own symptoms and not…

COVID-19 Vaccine Questions & Answers

As a Family Medicine Physician, helping patients navigate uncertainty and doubt around vaccines has been a part of my day-to-day job since long before the COVID-19 pandemic. I have always tried to approach those conversations with patience and understanding, knowing that behind their questions and even suspicion there is, without exception, a deep desire to…

What happened to the Flu?

What would a flu season like last year’s do for our tracking if the CDC were changing them all to COVID-19? By this point last year there had been 15,027 positive flu tests reported to the CDC. In that same time period this year, we’ve had 9,755,813 new COVID-19 cases (including me!). Shifting the flu…

What has two thumbs and COVID-19?

Doctors and nurses know they are going to get sick; it’s practically in the job description. We have the incredible privilege of taking care of people on some of their best and some of their worst days, but that also means continuously getting coughed or sneezed on, being exposed to contagious illnesses, and occasionally, despite…

So do I need to Quarantine for 7 days, 10 days, or 14 days?

So if the CDC isn’t changing the quarantine guidelines because of some scientific breakthrough that has utterly overturned our understanding of the virus’s incubation period or the way it is transmitted, why make the change at all? Because the 14-day quarantine guidelines aren’t working; not because quarantine doesn’t work, but because people won’t do it.…

Nobody wants to ruin your Holidays

I’ve had patients ask my advice on what to do about visiting grandparents and great-grandparents for Thanksgiving over the past few weeks. I hear their anguish, their indecision, their desire to celebrate with family fighting against their fear of spreading the virus to someone they love, and the deeper fear and guilt that they are…

COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation (minute-by-minute analysis)

In the context she is using it, ‘doing your own research’ at minimum means using the amazing, abundant resources of the internet to learn more about the concepts being discussed, and then using that new knowledge to get yourself over that first hump in the Dunning-Kruger effect and figure out 1. what you need to…

30 Days on Doctoring: Reflections on Death and Eternity

As doctors, we carry our dead with us no more or less than anyone else; it is only that we generally have many more to carry. For every tragedy where a family and friends are left to wonder “what could anyone have done?” there is a physician who is left to question, earnestly drawing on…

Don’t Be Afraid of COVID-19.

Please keep yourself and others safe. Don’t be afraid of the virus, but please act in charity to those around you by taking reasonable and proven precautions like wearing a mask, maintaining physical distancing, and engaging in sound epidemiological principles like getting tested if you are ill, self-quarantining if you are exposed, and honestly and…

30 Days on Doctoring: Medical Roadblocks and Barriers to Care, A Story.

A 2 year old little girl fell and broke her arm. It happened while playing outside in the evening, and when she wasn’t able to move it without excruciating pain, her family went to the Emergency Room at their local hospital. They chose that hospital, out of all the hospitals in town, because it was…

6%

I have a friend, a hospice doctor, who has completed over 500 death certificates since finishing residency a few years ago. He has included a sole diagnostic code maybe twice. What Dr. Hesse sees as the ‘real’ COVID-19 deaths, these 9,210 death certificates without any other documented diagnoses, are actually an anomaly; I am forced…

Back to School

On some level this math is incredibly simple; more people in close quarters means more cases, and more cases means more deaths. The real question is how much worse will reopening schools make the pandemic, and as we discuss below, whether that risk is justified right now. This question is going to answer itself in…

Please keep comparing COVID-19 to Human Trafficking (Part 2).

Last year myself and one of my clinic partners trained hundreds of physicians, nurses, and medical students to use their calling in medicine to recognize the signs of human trafficking and help address the unique medical and support needs of survivors. Last week, that partner and I both spent a significant amount of time in…

Stop comparing COVID-19 to Car Accidents (Part 1).

COVID-19 has already surpassed stroke, drug overdose, and the very deadly Seasonal Flu of 2017-2018, and there is zero chance that it won’t also surpass accidents and chronic respiratory diseases soon. But unlike the flu, COVID-19 did not begin to disappear in the late Spring and early Summer, and we are once again seeing a…

America’s Frontline Doctors (I guess I don’t count?)

No Dr. Immanuel, it is not unethical to refrain from using a medication in a clinical scenario where it has no proven efficacy. This is the philosophy that led to the opioid epidemic and every day leads to polypharmacy, another very real killer of the elderly. We took oaths to first do no harm, and…

Medical Misinformation Meme Monday

With so many pieces of misinformation floating around out there and so little time to write 3,000-5,000 word blog posts, today’s post is just an attempt to debulk the malignant tumor of COVID-19 misinformation. The rules are simple: 1. Memes only. 2. Each meme gets one paragraph only (I completely failed at this part). 3.…

A rare moment of cynicism: Why are the doctors lying?

It’s clear that there are some people who are not comfortable with the majority of physicians drawing one conclusion while a small minority draw the opposite conclusion unless one of those groups is lying. If that’s you, please consider which doctors have the greater financial motivation to build a false narrative- and stand to actually…

Texas doctors trying novel treatments (the trap of anecdotal evidence).

When lone wolf doctors promote unproven therapies and set themselves up as experts with miracle cures, without having actually done the clinical research to validate their claims, it erodes the fragile trust that we work so hard to build with our patients when we are unwilling to engage in that same type of speculative treatment.…

On Masking

Whether it is surgeons or industrial workers, cultures in which many women wear face coverings as part of their public clothing, or my 5 year old spending three weeks straight in his Spider-Man costume and refusing to wear anything else, the wearing of masks is something we all have some degree of experience with and…

“Non-Lethal” Weapons: A Doctor’s Perspective.

‘Less lethal’ still means potentially lethal, and many of the weapons and techniques being used still possess the potential to kill. They are not crowd control devices or nuisance stimuli, but weapons. The question we need to be asking ourselves is whether the use of weapons, including weapons with potential to maim and kill, has…

COVID-19 as a Mass Casualty Event; my response to a letter signed by 600 doctors.

The physicians who wrote this letter are advocating that life return to normal. But just as in every mass casualty, their call to shift our standard of care and abandon transmission reduction strategies necessitates allowing some to die who might otherwise have lived. This group that should be forsaken, who in the letter’s own words…

I absolutely do look at your insurance (repost).

I’d love to tell you that I don’t care what insurance you have. I’d love to say it just doesn’t matter to me, that every patient gets an equal share of my time, energy, and attention. I’d love to tell you that I treat your CHF and shoulder pain exactly the same if you have…

Dallas Doctor Speaks at Set Texas Free Rally

Anecdotal evidence is important in medicine, but the principles of evidence based medicine also dictate that, as scientists, we rely on stronger forms of evidence when they are available. If that evidence seems to contradict what we ourselves have experienced, that is reason to both examine the evidence more carefully, and to reflect on our…

Debunking the Latest “Truth the Government Doesn’t Want You to Know” Video.

Last night a friend sent me the latest viral COVID-19 misinformation video. You can view it below, though once it is inevitably removed from YouTube I won’t bother to re-link to it; I am sure it will be popping up on your Facebook feed soon enough (if it isn’t already). Having recently spent considerable time…

The Paradoxes of PlanDemic

This is a false narrative and, frankly, on the grossly cynical side even for the conspiracy theory people. When you intubate a severely hypoxic patient, having tried everything else you know of to keep them off the ventilator, your decision is to use a ventilator or watch them slowly die gasping for air. Unless you’ve…

Lies, Damned Lies, and a Few More Statistics – Dr. Erickson and COVID-19, Part 2

The major failure here is to distinguish between microbes and pathogens. Dr. Erickson wouldn’t tell you to touch your face and not wash your hands if you had been around Ebola. He wouldn’t tell you not to wash the surface of your kitchen counter if you had been cutting up raw chicken. He wouldn’t tell…

Dr. Erickson and the 3rd Kind of Lie (Statistics)

I really believe that this could be me, were the circumstances different, going on youtube and sharing these false statistics. Yes, Dr. Erickson has financial interests at stake here, but so far I’ve been inclined to think that he really believes his numbers. When you are pouring over data like this for hours or days…

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