AKMG BLOGS

  Women in Medicine — A Story of Many  I am a woman. A woman in medicine. An immigrant mother in medicine. Sometimes I wonder what my life might have been like if I had been born as a man. Would the responsibilities have been different? Would the struggles have been different? Would the road I travelled have been a little easier? I will never know. But I have come to believe that equality does not necessarily mean that men and women must be the same. I believe in something closer to gender neutrality - the freedom to be different without being considered less. I know there are things my husband does for our family that I struggle to do. I cannot change the oil in the car. I cannot change a tire. I have tried to understand investments and finances, but somehow my brain refuses to cooperate. I have enormous respect for women who can do those things. A women can. A woman is no less capable than a man. But I am also comfortable admitting that there are things I cannot do. Perhaps ...

  The IndiaAI Mission, led by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), is building a robust AI ecosystem across India through a network of State and Union Territory AI Centres of Excellence, compute infrastructure, skilling programmes, and responsible AI governance frameworks.  The MeitY IndiaAI Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence Thiruvananthapuram, Keralam (CAIK) was launched by Shri P. K. Kunhalikutty, Hon’ble Minister for Industries, IT and AI, Government of Kerala, on September 30. This launch marks a major step toward building a strong applied Artificial Intelligence ecosystem in Kerala by providing an AI Startup Studio, Garage and Powerhouse to contribute to India’s sovereign AI capabilities. See details here:  https://caik.in .  CAIK is established under the IndiaAI Mission of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Gov...

  Dr. Vijayaraghavan is a legend. He passed away. I am his closest friend. He after retired as a professor from TVM MC he went to UK and Kuwait and finally landed in California with Dr. Praveen Shaw. There he published a book after research the book on Doppler echo. Today they are all life saving. Then he refused to stay in US and returned. Then with Sahadulla he started KIMS. Then he started the first Echo Lab in India. He introduced Doppler. Great help humanity . He deserves all awards. He never sought awards. I miss him. My long time friend. We went to Ponmudi together we climbed the Aruvykkara hill. May his soul rest in peace.  DR.KRISHNAN NAIR, CARDIOLOGIST, PHILADELPHIA, USA Vijayaraghavan Sir’s (GVR) passing is a profound loss!  A cardiologist and teacher par excellence, he belonged to that rare generation for whom clinical medicine was both science and art.  We were fortunate to have him during our MD days, after the Gulf War brought him back from Kuwait to M...

Book Review Treatise on Heart Disease in Indians Enas A. Enas, MD, and Basil Varkey, MD (Jaypee Brothers Medical Publications: New Delhi / London—available on Amazon.com) Cardiovascular disease remains the foremost cause of death worldwide despite the extraordinary advances made in its prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Y et, within this global epidemic lies a particularly troubling paradox: people of Indian and South Asian origin continue to experience coronary artery disease (CAD) at an earlier age and, in many instances, with greater severity than many other populations. The burden is not confined to India. It extends to Indians and other South Asians living throughout the world. In India, coronary artery disease and stroke have increased in both urban and rural populations, and the future trajectory remains deeply concerning. Treatise on Heart Disease in Indians addresses this important and long-overlooked disparity. The book is the culmination of Dr. Enas’s decades-long clinic...

I was fortunate to spend nine extraordinary days exploring TANZANIA . This became an immersive encounter with the natural world unlike anything I had experienced before.  Our route carried us through  Tarangire National Park, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and Crater, and the vast Serengeti ,  with each landscape offering a distinct character and rhythm. TARANGIRE is renowned for its large elephant herds, ancient baobab trees, and the life-giving Tarangire River, which attracts wildlife when the surrounding land becomes dry.   NGORONGORO offered a completely different setting: a vast volcanic caldera whose grasslands, wetlands, and forests support a remarkable concentration of animals. The wider conservation area is also unusual because wildlife shares the landscape with MAASAI pastoralists . In Tarangire, the river corridor becomes a natural gathering place during the dry season.  Elephants browse beneath the baobabs, while zebra, wildebeest, buffalo, and...

When people ask what it is like to be a woman in interventional electrophysiology, I tell them the truth: for most of my career, I was the only one at the table. Not the only woman in the EP lab; nurses, techs, and coordinators have always been the backbone of every EP lab I have worked in, but the only woman standing in lead, with the catheters in her hands. That has changed. It has not changed enough. Cardiology remains one of the least gender-balanced fields in medicine, and the procedural subspecialties EP, interventional, structural are the narrowest part of that funnel. We are not short on talented women entering medical school. We lose them somewhere between the classroom and the lab. I have thought a lot about where that loss happens, and I no longer believe it is mostly about ability or even about ambition. It is about permission, the quiet, cumulative sense of whether a room expects you to be in it. The room does not hand you authority ... Early on, I learned that bei...