Back in late March (people often tell me that, these days, 4 months ago might as well be 4 years ago) we talked with emergency physician Julian Flores, who was working out of Broward County. Covid-19 cases were modest in number but threatening to get worse, and indeed they did. The county’s cases jumped 100-fold, from […]

Don’t expect HIPAA regulations to protect your “digital health footprint” from prying eyes. Every time you swipe your card to buy goodies at the supermarket (are you risking diabetes with all that ice cream?), or binge-watch that kinky series (how’s your mental health these days, really?), or let your step-tracker show you’ve fallen off the pace […]

We interview Dr. Michael Gonzalez, a Houston-based emergency physician, who describes the situation there as “an ongoing, slow-rolling, level 6 hurricane that just isn’t gonna go away and, more importantly, isn’t gonna tell us when landfall is coming and when it’s gonna be over.” How are his patients reacting to this surge? What does he do […]

This time Dr. Ali Raja and Joe Elia talk with two authors of a study that found disparate effects on traffic deaths from the legalization of recreational cannabis. The two states under study, Colorado and Washington, were compared, not with each other, but with a composite of states that most closely resembled what Colorado and […]

The novel coronavirus obviously has devastating effects on the lungs, but other, less immediately visible attacks occur — notably to the kidneys. Dr. Steven Fishbane (a nephrologist) and his colleagues have just published their findings based on a survey of some 5500 patients with COVID-19 admitted to a metropolitan New York health system. Acute kidney injury […]

A combination of three antivirals — Kaletra (which is lopinavir plus ritonavir) and ribavirin — when given early and with interferon significantly reduces viral shedding, disease symptoms, and hospital stay in  patients with COVID-19 when compared with a control regimen of Kaletra alone. The drugs are active against other coronaviruses, but the key factors seem […]

We (Dr. Danielle Bowen Scheurer and Joe Elia) talk with Dr. John Jernigan of the CDC COVID-19 Investigation Team, which recently published its findings on the spread of COVID-19 in a Seattle-area skilled nursing facility. Most intriguingly, over half the patients who tested positive were asymptomatic at the time of their first testing, and a few […]

Cardiovascular consults are way down. Is the threat of COVID-19 infection scaring people away from EDs? We caught up with Dr. Comilla Sasson, the American Heart Association’s VP for science and innovation. She’s an emergency physician who teaches at the University of Colorado. She’d traveled to New York City to “help with the response,” and she […]

This week’s guests, Dr. Andre Sofair and Dr. William (“Rusty”) Chavey are physician-editors on the daily clinical news alert called Physician’s First Watch. I went back through the recent issues and found this January 10 entry, which began “The CDC is requesting that clinicians ask their patients with severe respiratory disease about any travel to Wuhan […]

Four weeks ago — in early March — I interviewed Dr. Renee Salas about climate change and clinical medicine. Back in those halcyon days, COVID-19 was very much a gathering storm, but it had not yet slammed into the United States. Here we are, over 10,000 U.S. deaths later in early April, not having heard of much […]