Columnist and Medical Student Editor
Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University
Yash attends Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA. He pursued a Bachelor of Science in premedicine at Penn State University. Prior to attending medical school, Yash worked on clinical and translational oncology research at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He has long-standing interests in contributing to medical education, advancing health policy, and working with cancer patients. He enjoys playing tennis, rooting for the Eagles, reading, and traveling in his free time.
COVID Chronicles
The COVID-19 pandemic posed a tremendous challenge to our community – certainly from a health perspective, but also in nearly every other aspect of daily lives. Our daily routines were upended – from the way we work, play, learn, socialize and travel. Numerous times, the unimaginable happened, and it is safe to say we will never see the world in the same way again. As future physicians, it is important that we recognize the challenges faced by the health care space during the pandemic, and perhaps more importantly, the everlasting transformations that our future medical students, physicians and patients will encounter. This column explores the countless obstacles we overcame and their everlasting effects, along with emerging trends that we will see in health care for the years to come.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdown precipitated wide-ranging effects on nearly all aspects of our society. Perhaps some of the most severely affected patients were those fighting cancer. These patients have little physiologic resistance to COVID-19 and accordingly experience higher morbidity and mortality when infected.
Recently two prominent children’s hospitals have made unprecedented announcements. Boston Children’s Hospital and Chicago’s Laurie Children’s Hospital announced that they would stop performing certain surgeries on children born with intersex traits. These announcements come after huge direct efforts by advocacy groups like The Intersex Jusice Project, lead by Pidgeon Pagonis, and InterAct, a national intersex youth advocacy group.
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.
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.
