Contributing Writer
Albany Medical College
Marc is a second-year medical student at Albany Medical College in Albany, New York in the Class of 2023. In 2019, he graduated from Union College as Salutatorian with a Bachelor of Science in economics and biology. He also holds an MBA in Healthcare Management from Clarkson University. Marc enjoys reading, running, and exploring local restaurants. In the future, Marc hopes to intertwine his medical training with his business experiences to improve the management of chronic diseases.
The incidence of chronic disease is strongly correlated with aging. According to the Information Theory of Aging, aging results from a progressive loss of genetic material due to gradually worsening cellular repair mechanisms. This cellular erosion leads to a nearly interminable list of diseases, including but certainly not limited to cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disease.
This year, a new threat has emerged. Across the border in Iran, COVID-19 has killed scores of people and infected many more, including a deputy health minister, prompting the Iraqi government to close the frontier. Iraq reported its first cases in recent weeks, with 1,415 current case numbers, as of April 15, 2020.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, shares a high degree of homology with SARS-CoV, including sharing the receptor protein ACE2. We hope our medical student readers will find this review helpful, informative and concise.
Though there are no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Saipan, the island commonwealth has become a ghost town.
Working with other medical students at our university, and with others all across the country, we have developed an initiative designed to match students with health care workers in a longitudinal one-to-one relationship to adhere to social distancing guidelines and provide necessary services such as childcare, petsitting, and errands.
This is a question that I have been asked dozens of times over the last several weeks. Ever since the World Health Organization (WHO) and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the COVID-19 outbreak a public health emergency, news media has integrated COVID-19 into the news cycle constantly.
Seeking to document the experiences of students in street medicine groups at medical schools across the country, I decided to start with my own institution, the University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine.
The room is unassuming from the outside. It’s a tiny space not much larger than a storage closet tucked into an office in the school of public health. I do my usual clinic routine in reverse: notebook pulled out of pocket and white coat slipped off and left outside.
Why does a life-saving drug, for infants no less, carry such an astronomical price tag? Nusinersen falls into the category of ‘orphan drug,’ a drug designed for a disease so rare that it becomes fiscally unsustainable for corporate sponsors to invest and market the medication to the public.
EMRs have been devastating — residents spend 60% of their time in front of the computer writing their note, where it used to be five minutes in shorthand. We have not made things more efficient. We’ve made things worse for physicians in practice.
When you pick a residency, the name is irrelevant, where you go is irrelevant, your score is irrelevant. If you don’t like the people, your life will be miserable.
When you leave medical school and go to your residency, what you realize is it’s a lot more than OnlineMedEd. No kidding — pelvic anatomy is a 20-minute video. Turns out there’s more to know than that. If you’re going to become a gynecologist who does surgery, you’re going to learn a hell of a lot more than I teach there.
Editor-in-Chief
Brown University Alpert Medical School
Nihaal Mehta is a member of the Class of 2020 at Brown University Alpert School of Medicine. Originally from Lexington, MA, he also attended Brown for college, graduating in 2014 with a degree in Health and Human Biology and subfocus in Global Health.
Nihaal’s interests lie in medicine and its intersections: with health systems, policy, and the humanities. In college, he worked as a Writing Fellow, a Teaching Assistant for biology and public health courses, and assisted in the design of a course that examines controversies in medicine. Before returning to Brown for medical school, he spent a year working in consulting on health care business, strategy, and policy. He plans to specialize in Ophthalmology, and has conducted research focused on optical coherence tomography and retinal disease.
