Writer
Health and Medicine
In my government and reporting days I had the opportunity to follow policymakers as they took the first steps to try and reform an expensive and often unresponsive care delivery system.
Massachusetts was among the first states in the nation to try and to reform the health insurance system in the 1980s.
And I had the opportunity to collaborate with former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis and his class of Northeastern University masters of public administration candidates as they created a blueprint for “Insuring American Health Care in the Year 2000,” a document presented to 1992 Democratic nominee and eventual President, Bill Clinton.
Working for a major teaching hospital gave me a unique opportunity to double my areas of expertise. And get in on the ground floor of the growth of science and health reporting.
Amid the daily press releases about clinical programs, financial results and business acquisitions, my time in health care communications offered a chance to report on the research published by Harvard Medical School faculty in science and medical journals.
That included studies by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center clinicians on a trailblazing program to offer patients clear and easy to understand notes about their visits and the necessary follow-ups. They also explored a broad range of errors, from surgical mistakes to failing to treat patients with dignity and respect.
I was also able to do detailed reporting on efforts at McLean Hospital to treat substance abuse disorder; how a brain bank works to help unlock potential psychiatric and medical treatments; and help demystify the wrong impressions society held about electroconvulsive therapy.
But I rank another project I did for McLean on post-traumatic stress disorder as the pinnacle of my medical and science reporting.
PTSD is frequently bandied about as a synonym for stress. But it’s so much more than that.
In an in-depth series of articles published as a newsletter, I explored the molecular origins of the syndrome, the role those molecules play in regulating stress in the brain; how sleep (and nightmares) figure into the roots of PTSD; what research is being done into how those molecules affect the brain’s “fight or flight” response; and ultimately how PTSD might be treated in the future.