From Our Blog

By Ron Epstein, MD

For many of us, amid the fears and uncertainties of the past year, the pandemic has been a time of reflection and re-integration of our life vision, purpose and meaning. The pandemic has brought many of us face to face with what really matters, and, for many of us, the things that mattered most before the pandemic matter even more now…

By Mick Krasner, M.D.

Our training for a career in medicine feels, at times, like this- just waiting to go on. It is lengthy, tedious, physically, emotionally, and cognitively demanding, and we often ask ourselves questions about our readiness and our competencies, while along the way doubting our places of belonging in this profession. Rehearsing for this work is one thing but stepping onto that stage is another entirely…

By Fred Marshall, MD

As the rate of COVID infection begins to wane in our community, the trauma of our prolonged isolation from one another weighs heavily on my heart. I think about my patients and their families. So many of the people I care for are elderly, many living in nursing homes or assisted living facilities from which their family members were barred for nearly a year. The toll that social isolation has taken is profound…

By Mick Krasner, M.D.

Although local and small in a certain sense, each of us as health professionals, directly or indirectly, has been those health professionals who Dr. Runyan describes, leaning into the unknown and showing up for whatever presents itself moment by moment, day after day…

By Ron Epstein, M.D.

A few months ago, at a master class, I played a movement from Bach’s first English Suite. I was focusing on the details, as if each note mattered more than anything else in the moment, which, of course, in Bach’s exquisite complexity, is not an unfair assumption. Mark, the teacher whom I was meeting for the first time, said to me that the notes didn’t matter, it was the figures that mattered…

By Fred Marshall, M.D.

Winter has come to Rochester. The slowly setting light fills the sky with a faint glow, amplified by the snow on the ground and the ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. Russet-rose fades to orange-yellow, pale blue, dark blue. Finally, black night blankets the low slung hills and the snowy tree tops…

By Mick Krasner, M.D.

Just over 100 years ago in the aftermath of the first world war and the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, Yeats wrote these words as his pregnant wife lay close to death, suffering from the same virus that killed an estimated 20-50 million people. An almost equal number of deaths resulted from the war itself. It is unimaginable, the scale, depth and impact of those events at that time…