Bharat Kumar, MD, MME, FACP, FAAAAI, RhMSUS, is a clinical assistant professor of internal medicine in the Division of Immunology, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, Iowa City. Before assuming the role of physician editor, he was a member of the ACR Board of Directors (beginning in 2020). After attending college at the University of Pennsylvania, he went to Saba University School of Medicine and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Kentucky. He arrived in Iowa in 2014 and completed fellowships in both rheumatology and allergy/immunology in 2017, as well as a master’s degree in medical education and certification in musculoskeletal ultrasonography. His clinical interests include the intersection of autoimmunity and immunodeficiency, musculoskeletal ultrasonography, and ocular inflammatory diseases. As the associate program director for the rheumatology fellowship training program, he is also driven by a desire to improve the quality of medical education as well as the value of clinical work for both patients and practitioners. Outside the clinic, Dr. Kumar has a keen interest in medical journalism, quality improvement and humanism, and is the Arnold P. Gold Foundation’s Humanism-in-Research Associate Editor.
I was cleaning out an old storage closet in my parents’ house in Florida when I stumbled across some notes I took in medical school. As I leafed through pages and pages of notes filled with doodles and reminders, I found a statement that gave me pause: “Immunology—what is it good for?!” To be honest,…
If you’ve been a long-time reader of The Rheumatologist, you may have noticed that things look just a little different in this issue. The logo has changed, the font appears distinct, and the bylines are, for lack of a better term, aligned differently. If you’re looking at this online, the menus have changed somewhat, and…
In this premiere episode, Dr. Kumar discusses what’s new at The Rheumatologist, the deliberate approach we’ve taken to a redesign and how rheumatologists can incorporate human-centered design thinking into their practices.
A Roshi (i.e., master) apparently said that in Zen, “there is nothing to believe and everything to discover.” Interestingly enough, I have never been able to confirm who actually said that, which makes this saying about belief and discovery particularly apt. Regardless, I think about those words at least twice a day when I am…
Modern healthcare is, for better or for worse, the hybrid of many different fields—some that are expected, such as biomedical science, and others that are less well appreciated, such as astrology and palmistry. One modern contributor to healthcare is management. Nowadays, we’re inundated with all sorts of jargon from the business and policy worlds: turnover,…
Resilience. That word has been living rent free in my head for the past three weeks. And rent free is a bit of understatement. It all began at the end of a very productive clinic, when the trainee and I sat down to discuss our reflections on the interactions with patients that we’d had in…
“When you get a good mentor, don’t let ’em be the one that got away.” Richard Brasington Jr., MD, FACP, MACR, told me this about a decade ago when I was a rheumatology fellowship applicant and first met him. It was clear the statement was influenced by his love of fishing. Dr. Brasington’s office was…
Mistakes are a part of life. In fact, they are a large part of my life. Whether uncovering inborn errors of immunity, teaching about diagnostic errors, identifying systemic lapses in high-quality care or correcting spelling errors in manuscripts, my entire being is centered on studying and examining mistakes. To a certain degree, I feel like…
Spam, spam, advertisement, spam … wait wait, what’s this? A small envelope, addressed from Maine. I wonder what this is about? Usually, when I get an envelope this size, it’s a letter from someone trying to sell me something or complain about something I have no control over. So imagine my surprise when I found…
A plain X-ray film appeared on the computer screen—a humerus, a radius and an ulna were all visible. My pupils zoomed around the screen, and on initial inspection, everything looked fine. However, this X-ray was unlike any film I had ever reviewed. You see, it was for my then 4-year-old puppy, Lexi. My sweet little…