Thoughts of a retired physician

  Time for my last blog post of 2021, a year that started badly and hasn’t much improved IMHO. There are multiple stories for this year that will be recounted in history but in my view, the two major ones remain an attempted coup by Trump and Trumpists in January and the continued ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic with new variants (Delta and Omicron) making their appearances.  The conspiracy by Donald Trump and his confederates continues to emerge from the dark shadows where it has been concealed by ongoing lies and propaganda. There is no Great Steal; that is a lie. The election of 2021 was won by President Joe Biden. Trump and his criminal cronies can lie all they want but the January 6 Committee is bringing to light a conspiracy to overturn the election and install Trump as a dictator. The idea was that the insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January would result in a bloody confrontation with leftists and that would allow Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 . The military wou

  Two things today. First, read the latest post from Heather Cox Richardson . As usual, her summary and analysis of what is happening with the January 6 Committee is spot on. As more and more records come to the fore, the scope of the coup conspiracy is increasingly clear. There was a coordinated effort by Donald John Trump and numerous people in his thrall to overthrow the government and our Constitution on January 6th. This is a criminal conspiracy and needs to be dealt with as such. No “let’s forget this and move on” and no whataboutisms and no convoluted excuses soaked with right-wing propaganda. If you honestly believe that this was not a full-scale attempt to overturn an election and install a sociopathic grifter as dictator, I have no words for you that are printable. Over the next few weeks, I am certain the pieces will fit together.  The second problem is the Omicron variant of Covid 19. The data remain fuzzy but there are some harder edges appearing. In today’s CDC/IDSA webin

  Short post this week. Working on our Current Events for Tuesday next, decided we needed to really talk about the danger to American democracy. There are three really good articles in The Atlantic by Barton Gellman that are worth the read. The first one was published online in September 2020 - what will happen when Trump fails to concede. Highly prescient. The second one is from 17 January 2021 – how close were we to a coup?  Scary. Then the third one from 6 December 2021 – which makes the case that the danger is increasing to red-alert levels. I am also rereading Timothy Snyder’s superb book On Tyranny . Plan to use that as a framework to illustrate that Trumpism is no different from the other right-wing authoritarians today or in the past. More to follow – I urge you to keep up with developments on this. The threat is real.

  This has been one hell of a week for events and news. Almost overwhelming and the news is either RB (real bad) or at least disheartening. The Omicron variant has produced a lot of chaos and that is heightened by what we don’t know about it and therefore really fear as well as the stage it steps onto of a pandemic closing in on two years' duration. The Supreme Court showed it has become only a space for partisan political hacks with the Mississippi abortion case. There was yet another school shooting in Michigan with a troubled and possibly schizophrenic 15-year-old who was aided and abetted by irresponsible and morally bankrupt parents who not only bought the gun for him as a Christmas present but ignored the signs he was mentally disturbed and then fled the law when they were indicted for involuntary manslaughter for their role. The school district also failed here. We also saw Putin building up military force on Ukraine’s border with a possibility of invading that country (hope

And now Omicron. Skipping over nu and chi for reasons of clarity, we now have Omicron (Ο) as the latest variant of concern in the covid pandemic. Scientists, public health officials, and epidemiologists are working overtime to understand this new variant. The best to say at the moment is that we are gathering the data and have precious few real answers to the myriad of questions. Multiple nations, including the United States, closed travel from the southern countries of Africa where O likely emerged. This is of doubtful real efficacy as cases have been reported from multiple nations in Europe, as well as Asia and Australia. Locking the barn door after the horse has fled seems to be a common occurrence with this pandemic but simply shows that in an interconnected world, walls and barriers are meaningless political statements rather than real public health policy. South Africa needs support and praise, not shunning.  The origin of O is also of interest. The current thought is that an in

  The human brain is the organ that literally makes us human. A product of long evolution, it has produced all of the art, music, culture, and science that we see today. From birth, we witness the miracles of its development -- awareness, language skills, motor skills, sociability. When adolescence occurs, parents and others are often frustrated at behaviors that seem completely irrational. What is increasingly evident in studies of adolescents and their brains is that they are really immature. It is apparent now that the maturation of the brain continues through adolescence and is only completed in our mid-20s. It is clear that the limbic system and the centers for rewards are mature years before the frontal cortex; this helps explain why adolescents often engage in risky behavior which often leads to morbidity and mortality. In the United States, 71% of deaths between the ages of 10 and 24 are from four causes : motor-vehicle accidents, other unintentional trauma, homicide, and sui

  I was in college when I discovered how interesting microbiology was. I majored in it and found the courses in medical school equally interesting. I did a senior year rotation in infectious diseases at Temple under Bennett Lorber, then a new assistant professor fresh from his infectious diseases fellowship. This was in January 1974 and I was hooked. The Navy offered me a fellowship in 1981 after a tour as a general internist at Naval Hospital Guantanamo Bay; I then spent two years at Naval Hospital San Diego which was tremendous fun as well as accelerated learning. The program at San Diego was also a shaping one. The problem of sexually transmitted diseases, especially gonorrhea, drove the research part of my fellowship. Little did I know how it would affect me for the remainder of my medical career. At Naval Medical Center Portsmouth Virginia, a full decade of running an HIV Evaluation Unit with Margan certainly cemented the importance of these diseases in my psyche. Upon retirement