When my mother was a child she caught diphtheria. She was able to survive. However, two of her siblings died from the same round of diphtheria. In 1938, measles, diphtheria and whooping cough were all in the top [...]

I was ushering at one of our weekly Saturday evening Masses. I greeted one of the widows attending the Mass. She told me that the one year anniversary of her husband’s death had just passed. It was difficult [...]

Halloween is a fun time for children. We sometimes forget about the origin of the celebration. November 1st is All Saints Day in the Catholic Church. It used to be called All Hallows (old word for Holies) Day. [...]

Sigmund Freud proposed many ideas as part of his psychoanalytic theory. Many of those ideas involve psychological defense mechanisms that humans use. One of those was called Projection. His logic is that the human ego has to protect [...]

I was doing my monthly pediatric review material and came across BRUE. I looked at it and said what the heck are they talking about. Then I realized that they had taken a condition that I had seen [...]

When I was a second year medical student, they brought in a patient with Huntington’s Disease. It was called Huntington’s Chorea in those days. The patient was in a wheelchair. She had a drawn haggard appearance. She had [...]

Getting into medical school has always involved a number of factors. For example, I was on the faculty of the Uniformed University of the Health Sciences (the military medical school). To even be considered for an interview at [...]

In the past I have written about something called justification bias. That occurs when we dismiss bad news about someone we like or good news about someone we dislike. There are other kinds of biases that we see. [...]

September is National Cholesterol Education Month. It, therefore, makes sense to review cholesterol effects and treatment. My father had high cholesterol and cholesterol plaques around his eyes. It was surely a contributor to his 1979 fatal heart attack [...]

One of the things that happens in medicine is that rare events are often not noted until a large enough population is involved in the medication or procedure. When I was practicing pediatrics, it was my personal preference [...]