Last month, a deeply religious man in India ended his life in a way that has been practiced for millennia by devout members of the Jain religion. His death made headlines when a state court in Rajasthan declared the practice, known as Santhara, illegal. The Jain...
It was a week into my elderly patient’s hospital admission when he began to have fever and profuse diarrhea, some 10-12 bowel movement a day. The diagnosis was not hard to make: a stool test showed he had C difficile. Another patient, a thin women in her late...
This summer’s Disney-Pixar movie “Inside Out” makes us think about our thinking. But, I wonder, first of all, “can we even think about our thoughts?” In fact, over the summer with campers at Lausanne Collegiate School, from junior kindergarten to seventh grade, I was...
Two weeks after my wife has a hysterectomy, she begins experiencing fevers that rise and spike each evening: 99.2, then 100.7, then 101.5. I am an infectious-disease doctor and a consultant for Medicare. And I am puzzled and a bit frightened. “What do we do?” asks my...
Sitting across the desk at the car dealership, Steven Ethridge, a soft-spoken salesman, was copying down the VIN number of our newly purchased van. “Last year, I couldn’t read the numbers,” he casually remarked. As a doctor, I was curious why a middle-age man would...
