Faculty Bibliography

Jewish community organisations from Palestine to the Lower East Side embraced medical advancements, promoting breastfeeding, milk for young children, vaccination, and sanitation. American medical schools- shamed by the Holocaust, influenced by the civil rights movement-finally dropped their quotas and Jews again took to medicine in numbers that vastly over-represented their proportion of the population

Potent combinations of antiviral medications that brought patients off their deathbeds and back to life, viral load testing and H.I.V. genotyping that helped tailor treatment regimens, screening of the blood supply, aggressive public health campaigns, prevention of maternal-fetal transmission -- we could hardly have envisioned the pace of development. The apparent H.I.V. cure as a result of a bone-marrow transplant in a man known as the "Berlin patient" has stimulated tantalizing gene therapy research

Though the evacuation during the hurricane was a dramatic event, the number of inpatients affected (500 evacuated, 275 discharged) was quite small compared with the tens of thousands of outpatients who rely on Bellevue for their medical care. The doctors of my clinic - internal medicine - had set up camp at Metropolitan Hospital, another New York City public hospital, in a tiny concrete-block annex in a parking lot

[...]scientists can't just walk in to a new space with a lab coat and a notebook; they need centrifuges, deep-freezes, lab animals, electron microscopes, incubators, autoclaves, gamma counters, PET scanners

[...] today it was me with the white coat, and her with the death sentence. A senior resident rescued him before he had a cardiac arrest, then screamed her lungs out at me in front of the entire emergency room staff.

When [Julia] walked out of our hospital without full knowledge of her prognosis, I had been derelict in my duty as her physician. I was fully aware that my job was to have "open and honest" communication with her, in a "patient centered" manner. But I couldn't. I couldn't bring myself to tell this young mother that she was going to die. The emotional layers in medicine, however, are far more pervasive. Emotions have been described by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio as the "continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming ..." This basso continuo thrums along, modulating doctors' actions and perceptions, while we make a steady stream of conscious medical decisions that have direct consequences for our patients. Emotions can overshadow clinical algorithms, quality control measures, even medical experience. We may never fully master them, but we must at least be conscious of them and of how they can sometimes dominate the symphony of our actions. I'd like to say that I'd handle the situation better now, with another decade of clinical experience under my belt, but I'm not sure. Today, at least, when my medical team faces the prospect of giving bad news or admitting a medical error, I try to help my students and interns pay attention to the basso continuo running underneath. I try to point out when our emotions might be impeding us, and when, as sometimes happens, they might be assisting us in caring for our patients. Doctors can't -- and shouldn't -- eradicate the emotions that grease the wheels of patient care. But being alert to them can help us minimize where we fall short, and maximize where we succeed.

A third way to increase donations is being pioneered in Israel. [...] Israel ranked at the bottom of Western countries on organ donation.

A third way to increase donations is being pioneered in Israel. Until now, Israel ranked at the bottom of Western countries on organ donation. Jewish law proscribes desecration of the dead, which has been interpreted by many to mean that Judaism prohibits organ donation. So Israel has decided to try a new system that would give transplant priority to patients who have agreed to donate their organs. In doing so, it has become the first country in the world to incorporate "nonmedical" criteria into the priority system, though medical necessity would still be the first priority. That Haredi Jews, as the ultra-Orthodox are known in Israel, would not donate organs was well-known in the country. But this was the first time anyone had openly admitted the paradox to Dr. [Jacob Lavee]. The unfairness of a segment of society unwilling to donate organs but happy to accept them nagged at him. After he operated on both patients, giving each a new lease on life, Dr. Lavee put together a proposal that would give priority to those patients willing to donate their organs. "We were swamped," said Tamar Ashkenazi, the director of the National Transplant Center of Israel. The machine that prints the organ donation cards usually handles 3,000 a month. During the 10 weeks of the campaign, 70,000 Israelis registered for organ donation cards. Transplants have increased by more than 60 percent this year.

[...] today it was me with the white coat, and her with the death sentence. A senior resident rescued him before he had a cardiac arrest, then screamed her lungs out at me in front of the entire emergency room staff.