As I was preparing for a parent conference, gathering information on autism and making copies to provide to the parents, I realized I was anxious. My stomach was in knots and I asked myself why I was nervous. It dawned on me that I was getting ready once again to tell parents that their child has autism. My Read more
Patients
On the morning of January 7, 2022, I woke up to a winter wonderland. I usually welcome snow—but on that day it inspired worry, not wonder. I am a first-year developmental-behavioral pediatrics fellow at Einstein’s Rose F. Kennedy Children’s Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center (RFK-CERC), where 32 of our 5- to 11-year-old patients with autism and Read more
As I flip through the short stack of medical journals I’ve accumulated each week, I often ask myself whether the research studies I am reading would pass the “grandma test.” Could I explain these studies to my grandmother in a way she could understand? Would she think they were important? Physicians, patients—all of us—are inundated Read more
Some things don’t get easier with time and experience. Telling parents that their young child has autism is one of those things. Even after nearly 25 years as a developmental pediatrician specializing in the early diagnosis of autism, sharing that news with a family remains one of the toughest tasks I face. A variety of Read more
No one else I encountered during my third year of medical school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine struck me quite like this patient. He was propped up in the hospital bed, gasping impossibly for air, with not a hint of relief in sight. A harrowing whistle of pain escaped his lips and wove its Read more
Bioethics is not about technology. This is a controversial statement, since bioethicists are often invited to comment on new issues at the interface of technology and health. We comment on gene therapy, on big data and medical research, on the use of advanced imaging techniques in the courtroom. But the questions we address are not Read more
