2020 was a year of disaster and a year of miracles. We’ll be living with the ripple effects of the disaster for years to come. The miracles may be overlooked. …

We are about to reach a sobering threshold in the Covid debacle: a half-million of us dead. And yet, there is much to be hopeful about, as case rates plummet and vaccines are reaching millions of people. I was nonetheless shocked to learn recently that two elderly women in my…

What in the world is going on in Crowley County? This past week, the worst outbreak in the country has been in a rural Colorado county I had never heard of — Crowley County, where more than 1 in 10 people have been infected with Covid-19. The county lies out…

Imaginary tense conversation from not so long ago: Physician: “I have to have my Covid patient on X medication or take them off X medication because otherwise they might die!” Researcher: “But you don’t even have the data to know if X medication is a good choice. If you keep…

A few years ago, I read a riveting and prescient book called Spillover, by David Quammen. It’s about diseases in animals spilling over — breaking the species barrier — and infecting people. Quammen has studied the most famous of these “zoonotic” diseases (including Ebola, SARS, MERS, and Zika, all famous…

My family loves books. We have a lot of them around, and we pass them from generation to generation. That is how I ran into a book called Current Medical Diagnosis & Treatment, which was once in my physician grandfather’s collection. It was first published in 1962, and copyrighted every…

While the country mourns the death of George Floyd and many call for radical changes in policing, we are hearing how structural racism has caused Covid-19 to devastate black communities. Last weekend I was at a Black Lives Matter event and saw this sign: Racism is a Public Health Crisis…

My great-grandmother lived to be nearly 107. She got tired of being half-blind, half-deaf and in a nursing home, so she announced she would give up eating. Her plan worked out great (though it would have gone faster if she’d chosen no water instead) and was in keeping with her…

Do you know someone who believes that hospitals are like the proverbial Hotel California — you can check in but you can never check out? There’s a milder version of this fear: you seek medical care but that means you run the risk of losing control, even at a doctor’s…