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Ervin Anies, MD Ervin Anies, MD (7 Posts)

Resident Physician Contributing Writer

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center

Ervin (Erv) is beginning his general intern year at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and recently graduated from the Uniformed Services Univerity of the Health Sciences in May 2022. While in medical school, he was the co-director for the on-campus peer-led curriculum aimed to foster conversations about diversity, bias, discrimination, and inclusion in both medicine and the military. His interests include medical education, promoting diversity, and utilizing the arts to augment the healing nature of medicine.




Three Sentiments

Medical student recollects hospitalization with pneumonia as a pivotal childhood experience that shaped his values. The care he received from dedicated clinicians and his family instilled trust and resilience, inspiring his pursuit of medicine. These reflections resurfaced during his white coat ceremony, affirming his commitment to embodying these principles in his future practice.

Food and medicine in America: harms of industrialization, and paths to healing

Food production and distribution and medical training and care have been similarly corrupted due to the prioritization of profit and emphasis on end results that value volume over quality by implementing assembly-line-like protocols. This has led to a crisis in preventable chronic disease, and a dearth of primary care physicians; both crises can begin to be healed through the use of small-scale, community based efforts utilizing biodynamic regenerative agriculture and local farmer’s markets, and the provision of care by Direct Primary Care family physicians who can provide affordable and accessible whole-person, whole-life care.

Mirrored Resilience: Reflection from a Hospital Bed

The poem describes the profound impact of an encounter between Catherin Potin, the narrator, recovering from a motor vehicle accident, and a young patient with a similar experience. Throughout our interaction, the patient’s strength and resilience illuminate a path towards healing, showing the narrator the power of shared vulnerability in overcoming trauma. This encounter serves as a reminder of the reciprocal nature of healing in medicine and the personal growth that can arise from patient interactions.

Old Pennies and Jelly Skin

This piece is inspired by a patient encounter with a middle-aged woman who was recently diagnosed with a severe and malignant cancer. I saw her in the primary care setting, and she was undergoing chemotherapy at that time. She had a unique demeanor about her and she shared with me how she waited all her life to do the things she really wanted to do and now she was unable to do a lot of those things. She told me her and her friend now share a joke whenever they are debating doing something fun/risky/random in which they say, “What are you waiting for, chemo?”

Sabrina Lazar Sabrina Lazar (1 Posts)

Editor, Medical Student Contributing Writer

Albany Medical College

Sabrina is an MS2 at Albany Medical College interested in plastic surgery. She earned her Bachelor's degree in Cell Biology with a minor in Professional Writing from the University of California, Davis. A proud Assyrian-American, she is passionate about mentoring fellow first-generation and underrepresented students in medicine. She can be found studying at local coffee shops, playing volleyball and water polo, or working on home improvement and gardening projects with her family.