Agents of Democracy

Mike Magee In the Age of “Doomscrolling,” Doctors and Nurses Need To Stay Focused On Their Primary Mission. Exactly 1 year ago, mental health experts alerted the medical world to their version of an assessment scale for yet another new condition – “doomscrolling.” As defined in the article, “Constant exposure to negative news on social […]

Mike Magee’s Advice To The AMA On Reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Mike Magee Stable, civic societies are built upon human trust and confidence. If you were forced to rebuild a society, leveled by warfare and devastation, where would you begin? This is the question the U.S. Army faced at the close of WW II, specifically when it came to rebuilding Germany and Japan, hopefully into stable […]

The Terri Schiavo Case: A Cautionary Tale For Justices Who Want to Play Doctor.

Mike Magee For the Justices on the Supreme Court considering allowing the government to “muscle out” the patient-physician relationship in the Mississippi abortion case (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization), the question each should be asking is, “What possibly could go wrong if we remove doctors from delicate life and death decisions?” For historic precedent […]

Note To AMA: Reversing Roe v. Wade Threatens the Patient-Physician Relationship and Societal Trust in Doctors.

Mike Magee “Should anyone present know of any reason that this couple should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace.” The admonition above first appeared in the marriage liturgy section of the Book of Common Prayer in 1549 that laid out Church of England guidelines for worship leaders at […]

Dr. Ralph Northam and the Culture of Forgiveness

Mike Magee Within 24 hours of the airing of Governor Ralph Northam’s 1984 Yearbook page last week, commentators were discussing the implications of his history of racial bias on his performance as a physician. Second year psychiatry resident Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu asked in STAT this week, “Why are we less forgiving of Ralph Northam as […]

Planning for Evil vs. Planning for Goodness: Why Medicine Should Embrace the Social Sciences.

Mike Magee An article by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in last week’s New York Times Sunday Review, “How Auschwitz Is Misunderstood”, created a dramatic contrast to an address I delivered a few days earlier at a New York liberal arts college titled “Closing The Empathy Gap: Leveraging Healthcare Relationships”. Goldhagan’s major point was that the widely […]

Are Doctors Afraid To Touch Patients?

Mike Magee Where do I begin? When I read the JAMA title last week, “Banning the handshake from the health care setting”, my immediate reaction was, “Seriously, have we gone this far?” Then I read the dispassionate opening, “The handshake represents a deeply established social custom. In recent years, however, there has been increasing recognition […]

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