Mara Gordon

I'm a primary care doctor, and, in normal times, my favorite part of the job is getting to see my patients regularly. But because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, I've had to substantially cut down on in-person visits to help put the brakes on the spread of the coronavirus.

In this time of high medical anxiety, the phones at my clinic have, understandably, been ringing off the hook.

A young woman came to my clinic on recent evening to discuss her irregular menstrual periods. She had scheduled the appointment weeks in advance, and we were slated to have 20 minutes together.

I'm a family physician in a busy urban practice, and when she walked in I'd already been seeing patients for 10 hours that day, with a new one showing up about every 20 minutes. The number of diagnoses I had considered over the course of that workday was dizzying.

A study designed to test the effectiveness of a controversial practice known as "abortion pill reversal" has been stopped early because of safety concerns.

Researchers from the University of California, Davis, were investigating claims that the hormone progesterone can stop a medication-based abortion after a patient has completed the first part of the two-step process.

"Don't read The House of God," one of my professors told me in my first year of medical school.

He was talking about Samuel Shem's 1978 novel about medical residency, an infamous book whose legacy still looms large in academic medicine. Shem — the pen name of psychiatrist Stephen Bergman — wrote it about his training at Harvard's Beth Israel Hospital (which ultimately became Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) in Boston.

Americans are losing trust in their doctors, says Dr. Marty Makary in his new book, The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care — and How to Fix It. The reason, he argues, is that medical care is just too expensive.

Clinics that take federal Title X family planning funding are adjusting to a new set of rules that limit what health care providers can say to their patients about abortion.

Hey, women: Dr. Jen Gunter wants you to understand your own vagina.

The California gynecologist is on a quest to help women get the facts about their own bodies. It isn't always easy. In an era of political attacks on women's reproductive choices and at a time when Internet wellness gurus are hawking dubious pelvic treatments, getting women evidence-based information about their health can be a challenge, she says.

But Gunter isn't backing down.

Finding a good primary care doctor can feel a little bit like dating. It's awkward. Your expectations are high. You know it's rough out there, but you're still secretly hoping to find the one.

So where do you begin? Just like dating, finding a doctor you click with is all about trusting your intuition.