RETROGRADE AMNESIAS Recently, I got the privilege to assist Denise Hunter with her latest book “Before We Were Us” (just released in September, it’s great – go read it!) where the heroine…

Amnesia, Part I A tale of three worlds. If you plan to use amnesia in a novel, it’s important to know what type of amnesia your character has, how they got it,…

Medical Team Working On Patient In Emergency Room How Authors Can Put Their Characters in the Hospital (The Right Way) When writing about hospitalization, the top question I…

This time of year, people love to be out hiking in cooler weather or participating in winter sports such as skiing, snowboarding, cross-country skiing and ice fishing. Normally, nothing bad happens. But…

If you want to give your character a miserable lifelong disease, give them an autoimmune disease. There are at least a hundred known autoimmune diseases. Some like Sjögren’s won’t shorten their lifespan.…

Writing about a spider bite for a character? First I want to go on record: I hate spiders. While painting an item on our screened porch, something dropped from above and landed…

In all honesty, at times the writing about coma (disorders of consciousness) in television and movies can be laughable. A character on a soap opera awakens dramatically after years in a deep…

Thankfully, I’ve never had a gunshot wound. I've treated nail gun injuries and gun shot wounds in the E.R. None are pretty! One brief article can’t give you the full story of…

Recently, author Deena Adams asked me to help with some characters in her novel who were injured in a fire and suffered severe burns. The situation was a younger man had run…

Wow, has this summer ever been hot, hot, hot! I hope you're staying cool. The opposite of hypothermia, if you're writing about heatstroke, excessive heat can cause your characters a variety of…

Have you, as an author, committed “novel malpractice”? Can you write authentically about medical issues? Most writers without a medical background struggle with that. Writers, television shows, and movies often get it…

As a physician for four decades, I’ve worn many hats. From a busy Family Practice office, to an occupational medicine clinic (workers' comp)  to onsite health centers in local industries. Then a…