Selected Publications
Gravity
“Wonder spreads his eyelids, white crescents curving above his irises, newborn moons that magnetize the tides of me.”
River Teeth, 2023
Halophilia
“What does it mean to have chosen to have a child in this time of climate crisis?”
Terrain.org, 2023 - Selected for Notable Essay List in Best American Essays 2024 & Finalist in Terrain.org’s 13th Annual Contest in Nonfiction
Where does the healing happen?
“Like the crocus I bent down to touch that spring day, my healing emerged from a dynamic, teeming soil of interactions.”
Family Medicine, 2020
Essays, flash nonfiction & advocacy writing
Up
“He reaches toward me, chubby hands smeared with cheese. I take a swig of coffee and wonder if this morning feels as strange to him as it does to me.”
Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, 2024
Moon-Belly
“When my toddler looks for the moon he squirms in my grip, arcs his body toward the cold dark sky.”
River Teeth, 2024
Leaf blowers are hurting Utah kids’ health
“You could drive from Salt Lake City to Denver and back and still not make as much smog as you would running that gas-powered leaf blower for a single hour.”
The Salt Lake Tribune, 2024
Gravity
“Wonder spreads his eyelids, white crescents curving above his irises, newborn moons that magnetize the tides of me.”
River Teeth, 2023.
Selected for “Best of Beautiful Things” re-publication, 2024
Halophilia
“What does it mean to have chosen to have a child in this time of climate crisis?”
Terrain.org, 2023 - Selected for Notable Essay List in Best American Essays 2024 & Finalist in Terrain.org’s 13th Annual Contest in Nonfiction
The health of the lake is the health of our kids
“As a pediatrician and mother, a big brown rally sign summed up my biggest concern: “No to Toxic Dust Bowl.”
The Salt Lake Tribune, 2023
Supreme Court’s limits on EPA threatens Utah children’s health
“It has never been more urgent and important for local governments to step up as climate leaders.”
The Salt Lake Tribune, 2022
Split
“COVID. COVID. COVID. This strident word that months ago did not exist and now seems to be our only word.”
Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, 2021
Concerns for children’s health won’t expire with the mask mandate
“As adults, we often have the power to choose the risks we take. Kids don’t have that privilege.”
The Salt Lake Tribune, 2021
Me, a Doctor?
“Seemingly nothing had changed about my knowledge or skills over the past several months. If anything, I had started to forget things I’d learned earlier. But now I was a doctor?”
Doximity, 2021
Unrooted
“It’s just a dead body. Body, not person. Say it. Try to believe it.”
The Examined Life Journal, 2020
Where Does the Healing Happen?
“Like the crocus I bent down to touch that spring day, my healing emerged from a dynamic, teeming soil of interactions.”
Family Medicine, 2020
Pediatricians’ Rx: Vote for Climate Leaders
“When suffocating summer heat descends day after day, we grieve for our newborn patients, whose tiny bodies cannot yet regulate temperature.”
-I Heart Climate Voices, 2020 (written by Hanna Saltzman, signed by 50 pediatricians nationwide)
Let kids be kids. With masks on.
“In this new reality, masks are not what will prevent children from being children. Masks are what will permit children to be children.”
Salt Lake Tribune, 2020
Becoming a Physician During the Pandemic: a 55-word story
Taking the Hippocratic Oath, I had imagined my future fear: Will I hurt you?
But now, also: Will you hurt me?
AAMC, 2020
Let’s Stop Telling Our Patients They’ve Failed Us
“When we, as clinicians, don’t get the result we were hoping for, in most cases the problem is not that our patients have failed our treatments. The problem is that our treatments have failed our patients.”
Doximity 2020
Lesson from the pandemic is to prioritize clean air
“Particularly relevant for the COVID-19 pandemic, air pollution can harm the very organs that appear to play a role in how COVID-19 causes death: the lungs, the heart, the immune system.”
Salt Lake Tribune, 2020
When learning medicine is not enough
“I asked if he had any medical concerns. ‘Just the usual stuff, nothin’ too bad,’ he replied. He then revealed what ‘nothin’ too bad’ meant: chest pain that took his breath away. Eyes going black without warning. Pain in his fingers and toes, with two amputated digits. Clothes hanging loose; waking up drenched in sweat.”
KevinMD, 2020
Your Grocery Cart on WIC
“…a corporate-influenced agricultural subsidy system has created a society in which an apple is more expensive than a bag of Cheetos. This broken system ensnares programs like WIC. People like Karen suffer.”
KevinMD, 2020
Medical School Curricula Should Highlight Environmental Health
“Teaching environmental health as a handful of individual facts scattered among thousands of other facts misses the bigger pedagogical picture: The human body is not siloed but, instead, continually interacts with and is changed by its environments.”
Academic Medicine, 2019
Don’t give your children a toxic port
“The last thing we need is the proposed inland port, which would add thousands of additional diesel trucks to the valley each day, further polluting our dirty air.”
Salt Lake Tribune, 2019
Why I Don’t Want a “Work-Life Balance”
“… this ‘work–life’ framing is about more than semantics. The words we use to frame our lives affect how we think about our lives, which then influences our productivity and happiness.”
Academic Medicine, 2018
What’s in a Word?
“In defining disease, we define health. Indirectly, our definitions affect how society views and treats people perceived as healthy or diseased.”
Academic Psychiatry, 2018
The Parts of a Body
“Disease first, person second… This way of thinking has become my new reality, and its permanence is my fear.”
Iatrogenesis: Essays on Becoming a Physician, 2017
Keep CHIP extension in the limelight
“Funding CHIP is essential, but cutting programs such as the ACA’s prevention and public health program is not the way to do it.”
Salt Lake Tribune, 2017
How Corporations like Coke are Greenwashing your Water
“Despite their young age, Amy and her friend have picked up precisely what the bottled water industry wants: the association of bottled water with our world’s most beautiful places.”
BeyondChron, 2013
Taking a Stand Against Water Privatization in our National Parks
“How can we privatize safe drinking water when people around the world—people I personally know living in places from Ghana to Peru to fracking-threatened sites here in California—don’t have enough of it in the first place?”
BeyondChron, 2013
Foot Focus: International Initiative to Eradicate Clubfeet Using the Ponseti Method
“Most people with clubfeet live in developing countries, where employment often depends on ability to do physical labor… Most clubfoot cases in areas of poverty are simply left untreated.”
Foot & Ankle International, 2009