“Resident Physician Contributing Writer
University of Washington Occupational and Environmental Medicine
Melissa Herrin is Chief Resident at the University of Washington Occupational and Environmental Medicine Residency Program, from which she is planning to graduate June 2023. She received her MD from Yale University School of Medicine, prior to which she worked in environmental consulting. With her training in OEM, she hopes to gain experience in clinical occupational medicine and to advance public health and environmental policies to reduce the health effects of pollution and climate change, especially in at-risk worker populations. She lives in Seattle with her husband and 17-year-old son and enjoys running, hiking, baseball and hanging out with their two cats.
“A lot of the men in my unit started getting sick and never got better. And we just didn’t know. I mean, all I want is to help build a group big enough that we might finally understand more about what’s happening to us.” The Veteran’s words were measured and resolute. I had just finished introducing myself and inquired how he had learned about the Burn Pit and Gulf War Registries. During this phone call, …
End-stage starvation is rare, but devastating. After exhausting its fat stores, the body breaks down its organs for energy: muscle, liver, kidney and finally the heart. The blood itself becomes toxic, in a dangerously narrow balance between brain death and cardiac arrest. As a pediatrician, I wish to protect all children from these symptoms. But as an American taxpayer, I worry about my contribution to the starvation of children in Yemen. President Biden recently announced …
On the morning of January 6, I awoke ecstatic to the news of Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff’s predicted wins in the Georgia run-off elections. To be frank, I have become hesitant to hope while inured by the near-daily attacks on civil rights by the Trump administration via executive orders and federal policies. Over the past four years, I witnessed with pride — but also fear — as community activists tirelessly organized to combat racist policies.
When do you leap into the unknown and venture into the uncomfortable? Is it after methodical deliberation or is it much more abrupt, emboldened by a critical decision? Perhaps it is a deep drive within you, one that propels you forward in a way in which you cannot look back.
Recent events have highlighted a systemic problem within our world, our country, our state, and our community. People of color fight an uphill battle in every facet of life, at every socioeconomic level. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception — as we all know by now, patients from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are disproportionately afflicted. But the spotlight has refocused on a chronic pandemic: systemic racism.
The pandemic points to an important lesson: a rejection of traditional leadership structures, at least those that feed into a profit-based medical system, may be necessary in order to create a different world. The union provides such a framework, vesting power in a collective of voices. But in order to succeed at the level of a union, physicians need to let their voices join that collective — they cannot expect a delegate or representative alone to do the entire job, just as we might expect a program director to guide us in the right direction.
I learned to trust my own discomfort as an indicator of the toxic power dynamics that breed abuse for both patients and health workers. I became even more attuned to the pitfalls of professionalism because of my membership in Put People First! PA (PPF-PA), a human rights organization made up of working-class people building power to win universal health care.
The nurses noticed the behavior first — how he answered for her, his arms on her shoulders, and, on the day of discharge, his refusal to leave her room to retrieve her medications. The labor & delivery floor was already in full swing when her nurse came over.
In the first two months of 2020, I watched with alarm as a cordon sanitaire descended on Wuhan. I lived there as an anthropologist completing my research on Chinese medicine in 2017. Friends from Wuhan — most of them doctors — were suddenly describing scenes out of a dystopian nightmare.
Has social distancing paradoxically made us closer? Can disease be tragically beautiful? I pondered these questions as I reminisced over the past few weeks working on one of the medicine floors in my hospital, grappling with these thoughts almost every moment as I have witnessed the world respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is difficult to put into words the level of frustration and despair that I have felt over the last few days watching the schizophrenic national response to this COVID-19 crisis and its detrimental effects on the work conditions of my colleagues. As an internal medicine physician working in Utah, it feels like it is the calm before the storm as emergency room and urgent care volumes are down as people try to socially distance to correct the spread of this virus. Other areas of the country are not so lucky.
As I check in on my patients each morning, I wonder if some will unexpectedly decompensate and die over the coming weeks. I think about myself and my co-residents who are in the hospital all day swabbing patients for COVID-19 without adequate personal protective equipment. Many of my co-residents are on home isolation as a result of this exposure, waiting for their test results and praying that our government will step up and fund more mask production, or civilians will return the N95s they’ve hoarded, or the set of a TV medical drama will donate their props to us.
Resident Physician Contributing Writer
Emory University School of Medicine
Vanessa Van Doren is a PGY-2 in the Emory University School of Medicine’s J. Willis Hurst Internal Medicine Residency program and a current participant in the Health, Equity, Advocacy, and Policy Track. She is a past national board member of Students for a National Health Program (SNaHP) and past Health Policy Committee Leader of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine’s American Medical Student Association (AMSA) chapter. She co-founded the Health Advocacy Leadership Organization, a longitudinal 4-year health policy and advocacy elective at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Dr. Van Doren's career plans are focused on ways to integrate research, clinical medicine, and advocacy to help build a truly equitable health care system.
