Michael Fine, MD

From the You Can’t Make This Stuff Up But It Makes Your Skin Crawl Department.  A friend in Texas, with newly diagnosed breast cancer, had to be scheduled for bilateral mastectomies. All quite traumatic and scary. As part of the process, she needed a preparatory procedure. She’s a doctor – she knows the “system” (so-called) […]

A 102-year-old man I know is likely to be sent home from rehab today.  This 102-year-old man lives in another state. Until three weeks ago, he was driving, playing tennis, and living in his own home. Over the last few months, he developed leg swelling and then shortness of breath, likely the result of some heart […]

Hantavirus on a ship, spreading person to person. Ebola spreading in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Uganda. 13 cases of Hantavirus, with three deaths. Over a thousand known cases of Ebola, with 17 confirmed and about 240 suspected deaths. What’s the world coming to? Is this the Zombie Apocalypse? My first advice is to […]

Some friends and colleagues from Brown University Health are arguing that Rhode Island doesn’t need a new medical school at URI – and that such a new medical school won’t help address Rhode Island’s primary care physician supply crisis. One part of that is true. If you dropped a medical school from outer space into […]

I am writing from the Island of Brava, in Cape Verde, where I worked for a week with a great little organization called Project Health CV, which brings American volunteers to Cape Verde a few times a year to augment the health care that people in Cape Verde get from the government and the tiny […]

In a recent Wall Street Journal Opinion piece, published just before he fired the CDC Director, our HHS Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr, argued that physicians should be taught about nutrition. He cited some very nice statistics about how little nutritional education physicians get. Poor diet kills 500,000 people a year, RFK Jr wrote. So, he […]

The first part of this week’s comment is about health, not health care. RIPTA, the organization that runs the buses in Rhode Island, is planning the largest set of route cuts in its history – to save $17.6 million. (There was a public hearing on this in Newport on Tuesday.) These cuts seem like a […]

First, the good news: kudos to our legislature for focusing on primary care.  Thanks to the work of Senator Pam Luria, Speaker Joe Shekarchi,  Senate President Valarie Lawson, Attorney General Peter Neronha and many many others, some critical primary care bills – funding a new family medicine residency for Woonsocket, improving primary care reimbursement under Medicaid by […]

We have a new Surgeon General nominee, Casey Means, a health influencer and former doctor who replaces Janette Nesheiwat, an urgent care doctor and Fox News host, as the nominee. Dr. Nesheiwat was suddenly reassigned to help RKF Jr., the erstwhile HHS secretary, in other ways, because she was criticized by Laura Loomer (who apparently […]

Ok, Chicken Little.  Is the health care sky falling? Since Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr) has announced the departure of about 20,000 of the 80,000 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) employees, my health professional and policy colleagues are predicting doom and disaster. And it’s not just the HSS employees: hospitals, universities, […]

So our fearless health care leader, the guy with the worm in his brain, is going around saying that we should let bird flu run rampant, run its course, kill the susceptible chickens and that way we’ll be left with a national chicken flock that is resistant to bird flu.  Is this crazy?  Or does it make […]

So it’s hospital gala time again.    You know the drill.  Fancy invitation.  Black tie optional event.  A thousand people in a convention center or hotel ballroom.  A high-powered committee on the invite, most of whom have nothing to do with planning the event itself, and sometimes bold-faced names who serve as honorary chairs, whatever that means. Adequate food.  Too many self-congratulatory […]

So there’s talk that Robert F. Kennedy Jr will defund the NIH.  Or something like that.  In full disclosure, I am not a fan of the man.  But, I also view the hysteria of academics and institutionalists about his nomination to head HHS with a somewhat jaundiced eye. The National Institutes of Health is the nation’s – and […]

So we may or may not have a guy with a worm in his brain running CDC or HHS.  Time will tell.  But it is clear that, for the moment, we have a guy with a famous last name who appears to be a vaccine skeptic, and who has the ear of the President-elect. What’s up with […]

I’m a Jewish fella.  I go to synagogue.  I read the parsha (Torah portion) of the week, every week.  I keep something approaching Kosher and keep something approaching Shabbos (which means I don’t work or travel Friday night and Saturday until sundown) imperfectly, but I think about it and feel it.  I’m more Conservative than Orthodox and imperfect in […]

You know the drill:  the doctor, nurse practitioner, or PA walks into the exam room, sits down at the computer and looks at the computer screen, not at you.  And then reads a bunch of questions for you to answer, many of which you’ve answered a hundred times before.  And then said clinician types in your answers, clicking […]

A friend in her sixties called to ask if she should take the new RSV vaccine, which is being heavily promoted to people over sixty.  That it is being so heavily promoted is driving me a little crazy.   Here’s the skinny:  RSV — respiratory syncytial virus — is a virus that has been around a […]

Last week, a dear friend, whom I’ve known since she was a child and who is now pushing 40, shared some troubling news. Her family doctor had left, and they were struggling to find a new one. This predicament wasn’t just affecting the adults in their household; it also concerned their nine-year-old daughter, whom they […]