Time Magazine named President Elect Joe Biden and VP Elect Kamala Harris as its persons of the year. Please don’t interpret it as a political statement when we say that if we had any say in the matter, our persons of the year would have been American healthcare workers. And of course, we’re partial to physicians around here. Doctors, since the pandemic hit America in February, we’ve been in awe of what you do. From the EM and pulmonologists who were directly affected, to the IM and FM doctors who tended to our communities, and to all of the specialists who worked outside of their specialties to meet the demand, we salute you. All of you have shown the grit and mettle of the American physician and brought honor to all of those who wear the white coat. As vaccines are distributed, we may be putting the worst of the pandemic behind us. Even still, thousands of Americans are ill or falling ill, and you keep showing up to save them. We continue to be grateful for your dedication and determination. But it isn’t just COVID-19 that gives us cause to celebrate the work of American physicians. Here are 5 times you impressed us in 2020. No rest It was a viral photo that captured the essence of what it means to be a doctor in 2020, and it spoke volumes about the emotional anguish that healthcare workers and coronavirus patients have faced since February. It was Thanksgiving day, and a sick, elderly man just wanted to see his wife. Dr. Joseph Varon, chief of critical care at Houston’s United Memorial Medical Center, did what he could to comfort him. Varon told Good Morning America: “It’s one of those things – you’re walking in the hallway and suddenly you see this man crying, alone, feeling desperate more intensely than anyone else I’ve ever seen. “And when you talk to him he tells you, ‘I want to be with my wife.’ “All of us would just go and hold the man, that’s what I did. I felt so bad for him that I sat with him until he relaxed.” At the time, Varon had worked for 258 days straight. Equity in medicine The killing of George Floyd during the pandemic highlighted the struggle for equity and social justice in America. The fact that it happened during a global pandemic also brought attention to the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on people of color. Suddenly, many Americans became aware of the fact that COVID-19 contained two crises: health and race. Organizations such as Black Men in White Coats, which have long advocated for greater representation of people of color among the ranks of doctors, found overdue, increased popular attention. And individual doctors began speaking out about what they were seeing on the frontlines of care, specifically how some populations were suffering more than others. Avi Varma, an Atlanta-based physician, wrote the following for the Healthcare Heroes Project: “As a physician, I recognize that there are racial disparities in the US healthcare system. Black Americans are at higher risk of dying from Covid-19. They suffer higher rates of hypertension and diabetes. Black women are more than 2-3 times as likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than White women. Black babies are twice as likely to die before their first birthday than white babies. Why do these disparities exist when as human beings, we are 99.9% identical in our genetic makeup? Why do inequalities exist when we all bleed the same color?” Much work remains to be done on this front. But much of America has now woken up to its necessity. Tackling double standards Lost among the pressing demands of the pandemic was a since-retracted study, published in the Journal of Vascular Surgery. Researchers looked at the social media accounts of 480 vascular-surgery grads. To access the grads’ personal photos, they created fake accounts and evaluated their photos as “unprofessional or potentially unprofessional content.” Sixty-one of 235 residents fell into this category. What landed them here? Drinking alcohol. Wearing a Halloween costume. And even sharing bikini photos. By the way, all of those behaviors are a) legal and b) socially acceptable. But the last really irritated a lot of female physicians, who took to social media to highlight the double standard. It’s OK for a male physician to pose for a bathing suit photo, but not a female physician? Overnight, the hashtag #MedBikini took off. Women have made many inroads into medicine, but these double-standards persist. #MedBikini was an effective way to highlight them. The doctor will tweet you now If you watched cable news at any point during the pandemic, there was a high probability of seeing Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the physician-researcher and dean of the Brown School of Public Health. What makes Jha so interesting and so effective is his consistency and clarity of communication. If you don’t follow Jha on Twitter, do it now. In the early days of the pandemic, his message was consistent and clear enough for a lay audience to understand: We need more testing, and we needed it yesterday. Check out this thread for an example: In recent weeks, Jha has been talking about vaccines, but he continues to do so in a way that is accessible. His efforts show us what is possible when doctors communicate effectively. A first-of-its-kind surgery In Baltimore, a little girl named Khloe Cox will be with her family this holiday season after a breakthrough surgery: a liver and pancreas transplant to treat a rare neuroendocrine tumor. Her surgeon was Dr. Srinath Chinnakotla at the University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital. Cox had a stage IV endocrine tumor, something practically unheard of in children. It had spread from her pancreas to her liver. The double transplant would become the first of its kind for someone so young. Dr. Chinnakotla operated for 12 hours, transplanting the organs, which had come from a child of only four years old. “Our team was happy that the Cox family chose M Health Fairview University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital for Khloe’s surgery, against the backdrop of not only COVID-19, but also the protests across the Twin Cities in response to George Floyd’s murder,” Chinnakotla said in this blog post. Amid the pandemic, there likely were many stories like this one. And we thank all of the physicians out there working to save the lives of our grandparents, parents, and the children like Khloe Cox. Source
