Philadelphia Medicine Summer 2020 - 4

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Letter from the president

Pandemics, a Near Suicide
and Telemedicine

Natalia
Ortiz-Torrent, MD
President

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e're in the midst of a pandemic that spreads quickly and aggressively and
marks for death aging people and others with underlying health conditions.
Also, mysteriously killing a small but significant number of young adults
and children who do not seem to have underlying conditions.

Is Covid-19 the world's worst pandemic? Around 131,000 patients had died in the
USA at the time of this article, but it is too early to predict how many people will die
before a hoped-for vaccine is available. We have made progress through contact tracing
methods, access to antigen and antibodies testing and medications protocols for the severe
inflammatory process triggered by Covid-19. We have identified new symptoms and drafted
new quarantine protocols. We have learned lessons from the current pandemic as we did
from the past struggles with medical mysteries.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic that began in 1981 and peaked between 2005 and 2012, killed
36 million people. The 1918 flu pandemic is estimated to have killed up to 50 million. Then
there was the Black Death, the Bubonic Plague in 1346 to 1353 that killed as many as 200
million people, about half of the world's population. Tragic medical challenges from which
we learned and have been able to find treatments.
Science and its first cousin, medicine, give us a fighting chance against diseases that
previous generations did not have, yet here we are socially distancing, wearing masks and
constantly washing our hands. So far, those are effective ways to mitigate the transmission,
but it's certainly a cautionary note for those of us living in a time filled with so many advances.
Covid-19 has put enormous pressure on our health care community. Our cover story,
however, makes the case that medical students, residents and physicians were dealing with
a great deal of unneeded pressure before the coronavirus.
Our editor, Alan Miceli, has written an article on burnout and physician suicide that
features Dr. Michael Weinstein, who at the height of his career as a trauma surgeon at a
Philadelphia hospital struggled with suicidal ideations.
He's still with us thanks to a loving wife who noticed his severe burnout and suicidal
inclinations. Dr. Weinstein believes that flawed medical school and residency programs, along
with a broken hospital system that encourages profits over physician wellness, exacerbated
his emotional distress.

EDITORIAL BOARD
* Corina Graziani, MD
* Alan Miceli, MA, Editor

Philadelphia Medicine : Summer 2020

* Susan Robbins, MD, MPH, FAAP
* Paul D. Siegel, MD

https://philamedsoc.org/

Philadelphia Medicine Summer 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Philadelphia Medicine Summer 2020