I was delighted to host a teaching session recently with 25 UC San Diego internal medicine residents, “Finding your writing voice.” I planned the hour as an interactive discussion of all types of creative writing, including fiction, narrative medicine, blogging, letters to the editor, and op-Eds. I talked about the work of Drs Abraham Verghese, Mark Vonnegut, and Paul Farmer, and ways to overcome writer’s block. I read my published essay “Health and Healing,” as well as an op-Ed draft I have been working on regarding the abolition of nuclear weapons.

The UCSD residents talked about the “imposter syndrome” they sometimes feel with their writing. They also discussed the idea of “the patient that haunts me,” a teaching conference started by Dr Joe Abdelmalek, a UCSD nephrologist. How do difficult patient interactions affect our mental health? We also talked about suicidality and how to maintain our mental health in medicine.

How can we support each other through writing and the arts and keep up our happiness? I will repeat the teaching session for another group of UCSD internal medicine in April. I’d be happy to give the talk to other groups – just contact me please.

Otherwise, things are going well in Boston. We have more snow, but that’s par for the course in Massachusetts in March. I ran a good 5K yesterday at the JP park run, 24:36. Today I am going to jog-walk the Malden 1/2 marathon, just as a training run. My plan is to take it slow, with two goals – not to get injured, and to finish the race if I can, before it is completed by the timers.

My next half-marathon after Malden is in Toledo on April 24, and I want to have as many good long runs as I can before then, to feel prepared. Today’s race is a 1/2 mile start, then five laps of a 2.5 mile course. My goal is to do each of those laps in 34 minutes, on average, which will bring me to the finish line in just under 3 hours. So my splits will be 40, 74, 108, 142, 176 minutes.

My last half-marathon was in 2017, and I ran it in about 2:05, but I was pushing hard. Since today is just a training race, I don’t plan to run hard. Here we go!

Finally- check out Dr James Hamblin’s recent piece in the New York Times about how trust in the CDC could be rebuilt. Although he didn’t really address what I consider to be the elephant in the living room (America’s wasteful, profit-driven $3 trillion health care system), it was one of the better essays I’ve read recently about why public health is failing. Single payer / Medicare for all, now!

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Today, I wanted to take a brief look at a paper from California entitled “Linking health education, civic engagement, and research at a large Federally Qualified Health Center to address health disparities.”

The researchers, led by Melissa Chinchilla PhD from AltaMed, in Los Angeles, were focused on health equity at the health center level. In the paper, they argue that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color are disproportionately impacted by health inequalities that continue to be shaped by structural racism.

The study examined how a group of community health center stakeholders developed recommendations for how to embed community based participatory research (CBPR) in an ecosystem of community engagement to address health equity. Stakeholders viewed engagement in health equity research in a healthcare setting as requiring sustained internal and external relationships [emphasis mine].

I think those of us working in Boston Federally Qualified Community Health Centers could learn from Dr. Chinchilla’s research. We have the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, but could be doing a much better job collaborating between health centers, with on-the ground groups, public health officials, universities, etc. And as we build these relationships, we need to keep an eye on long-term collaboration.

Thanks for reading my blog entry. If you enjoyed this post, please leave a reply below where it says “enter your comments here.” If you would like to be on my email list, please type in your email address on this website where it says “enter your email address.” Then, click the red button which says “Follow.” You will receive a message and after you click it, and you will receive my daily blog posts. 

In life, we need to set clear goals. Here are two of mine.

First, a running goal. Last night I signed up for a half-marathon in Toledo, Ohio which will occur on the morning of Sunday April 24th. It will be the second half-marathon I’ve run, the first being in Rhode Island along the Atlantic Ocean in the fall of 2017. That was challenging race, but I completed it in a little over 2 hours with a smile on my face. But now, I’m almost five years older and I about twenty pounds heavier. So I expect it to be more difficult, and I’ll run more slowly. But no matter. I have a clear goal – to finish the Toledo race and not get injured along the way.

How am I going to do that? Well I have been running and walking a decent amount this winter – 5Ks and other jogs. I’ve also been working with a running coach, Colin Turner, and group of students in a boot-camp. But with my travels and the ice and snow in Boston, I haven’t been focused on a race. Well, today, I am going to start being focused. My countdown is at 47 days.

I’m putting together a plan for how many miles per day I need to run, what days I will do long runs, speed-work, cross training, what foods to eat, etc. I’m excited for this race because my cousin, Kevan Toney, is going to be running the full Toledo marathon which occurs the same morning. Hopefully we’ll get a lot of family out at the finish line!

https://youtu.be/TdENfV4MLGI

And here’s the second goal. We need to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

Last night I attended a meeting of Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility (GBPSR) with such Nobel Prize luminaries as James Muller and Ira Helfand, along with Regina Larocque and Joseph Hodgkin and others. I was active with the organization from 2015-2017 but stepped back for a variety of reasons. But now, with the crisis in Ukraine/Russia, I’m happy to be involved once more.

The rationale for a world free of nuclear weapons has been made numerous times since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s was a time of high alert when people became very aware of the danger, along with the 1980s with the Cold War. Now, another wave for the abolition of nuclear weapons is building.

What can you do?

You can learn more about the issue, reading the Boston Globe article about James Muller, Ira Helfand, and colleagues. You can read the Lancet article Ira and colleagues wrote recently about nukes. You can sign this petition, No Nuclear War over Ukraine.

And you can contact me – at GBPSR, we are revamping our strategy for the abolition of these weapons. It’s clear that getting rid of the weapons will require a broad social movement. More countries, such as Taiwan, are angling to get weapons. But the more countries that have weapons, the greater the risk of accidental nuclear war.

Instead, we need a new global order, led by a revamped powerful United Nations and World Health Organization.

It was Albert Einstein who once wrote in a telegram: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”

In life, you need to set goals, and then figure out a strategy to achieve them.

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