Contributing Writer
Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine
John Damianos is a fourth year medical student at the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, Lebanon, NH class of 2020. In 2016, he graduated from Dartmouth College with a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics and neuroscience and a minor in French. He enjoys playing tennis, cooking, and studying Byzantine chant in his spare time. After graduating medical school, John would like to pursue a career in internal medicine, eventually specializing in gastroenterology.
Do-it-yourself (DIY) medicine is particularly appealing to those who wish to take their health into their own hands and remove costly, time-consuming physicians from the equation. Crucial, however, is the fact that these companies are independently run and thus are not regulated by any governing scientific body.
And so, I reincarnate the Biblical jeremiad for our purposes and admonishment: Beware of practitioners of pseudo-medicine. They come to you in physicians’ white coats but in actuality are mere salespeople.
To culminate a year rife with political turmoil, one final wildfire swept the nation at the close of 2017. After initial reports from inside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggesting that it had received instruction to forbid the usage of seven words in its budget formulations, media outlets and the general public took en masse to declare a state of Orwellian emergency.
Perhaps the most damaging legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency so far has been the fake news phenomenon. When Trump at one of his first press conference as president-elect pointed at a CNN journalist and said, “You are fake news,” he was doing a lot more than complaining about a media highly critical of him.
Dr. Alison Holmes, pediatric hospitalist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, did not expect to work in perinatal addiction. “I had no interest in addiction,” Dr. Holmes admits.
In 2006, Daisy Goodman first experienced a patient disclosing a narcotics addiction. A certified nurse midwife working in obstetrics, Goodman had had years of experience working with pregnant mothers to cultivate a healthy pregnancy and birth.
Contributing Writer
Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine
John Damianos is a fourth year medical student at the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, Lebanon, NH class of 2020. In 2016, he graduated from Dartmouth College with a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics and neuroscience and a minor in French. He enjoys playing tennis, cooking, and studying Byzantine chant in his spare time. After graduating medical school, John would like to pursue a career in internal medicine, eventually specializing in gastroenterology.
