Alyssa Burgart, MD, MA (BurgartBioethix)
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Alyssa Burgart, MD, MA (BurgartBioethix)
@alyssaburgart.com
11K followers 3.2K following 690 posts
😷Stanford Bioethics, Peds Anesthesiology, Feminist Gender & Sexuality

🧭Writes about bioethics @
Poppies & Propofol poppiesandpropofol.com

❤️‍🩹 Founder, The Moral Injury Clinic

(She/her/they/them)
Posts Replies Media Videos
alyssaburgart.com
I'm stoked to get to chat with the incomparable Mary Roach (@maryroach.bsky.social) about her new book Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy!

[link in 🧵]
September 9, 2025 at 3:41 PM
alyssaburgart.com
Got to meet @glaucomflecken.bsky.social today at the Big Ideas in Medicine conference.

I made him laugh, so I’ll be an insufferable unicorn all day. 🦄 🌈
Glauc laughs at something I said Me and Dr Glaucomenfleken, Will Flannery
September 5, 2025 at 5:51 PM
alyssaburgart.com
You can feel free to watch the video: x.com/JSweetLI/sta...
August 31, 2025 at 2:01 PM
alyssaburgart.com
Don’t confuse individual perceptions of goodness with collective good.
The human being who would not harm you on an individual, face-to-face basis, who is charitable, civic minded, loving, and devout, will wound or kill you from behind the corporate veil. -Morton Mintz
August 10, 2025 at 5:53 PM
alyssaburgart.com
Whiplash anyone?
Vinay Prasad returns to the FDA, weeks after his ouster Marty Makary’s deputy is back as top vaccine and biologics regulator
August 9, 2025 at 9:29 PM
alyssaburgart.com
develop anxiety disorders, panic attacks, and PTSD related specifically to the risk of enduring another shock.
ICDs have two parts: the ICD generator box and the electrical leads. The device sits under the skin on the left or right side of the chest, and the leads are inserted in the atrium and ventricle to both sense what the heart is doing, and to automatically deliver electrical impulses in response. Image source: Heart Foundation
August 5, 2025 at 2:51 AM
alyssaburgart.com
Nashville General Hospital says it never agreed to turn off 69-year-old Byron Brown’s defibrillator to facilitate his death by lethal injection.

The state plans to kill Brown tomorrow, August 5 at 10am, regardless of his cardiac device.
The court stated that delaying the execution due to an inability to get Brown’s device deactivated amounts to a “stay of execution” that they didn’t have the authority to authorize. The irony of this argument, when Brown was sentenced to death in 1988, is not lost on me.
August 5, 2025 at 2:41 AM
alyssaburgart.com
About 280,000 kindergarteners attended school without documented MMR vaccine series completion during the 2023-2024 school year

These numbers are not just statistics; they are a roadmap to future outbreaks.
Idaho leads in both medical and non-medical exemptions
August 1, 2025 at 10:06 PM
alyssaburgart.com
Conscientious objection claims relate to low vaccination rates - the Texas-driven measles outbreak provides a case study in how anti-vax propaganda fuels “deeply held beliefs” and loosened vaccine regulations.
Since 1971, Texas has allowed both medical and religious exemptions. In 2003, the Texas Legislature passed a provision allowing for a conscientious exemption to vaccination. All parents must do to exempt a child from vaccination and still attend public school is submit a simple affidavit to the Department of Health. Graph showing significant rise in vaccine exemptions granted in Texas per year and by child grade.
August 1, 2025 at 10:00 PM
alyssaburgart.com
For anyone who thinks high school literature isn’t useful, I just impressed my entire family by getting a geography trivia question solely based on loving Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.
July 31, 2025 at 12:33 AM
alyssaburgart.com
I wrote this letter as a first year medical student, 19 years ago. I’ve cared for many patients that have died since then, but this letter was never quite where I needed it to be.

What advice would you give to a young healthcare worker about bearing witness to death?

I hope I was kind to myself.
An envelope says “open when first patient dies”
July 19, 2025 at 4:31 PM
alyssaburgart.com
Know your patients’ rights.

Know your rights.

Know what’s right.

Do no harm.

Protect your patients.
ICE and CPB agents should be treated like any other hospital visitor - with restricted access.
July 13, 2025 at 5:26 PM
alyssaburgart.com
This is the core of moral resilience - to choose to have hope in the face of hopelessness. To choose to help despite the sense of helplessness. This is the kind of faith I feel I need every day. The faith to believe there is capacity for change.
When I started the Moral Injury Clinic last year, I knew in my soul and in my bones that there was value in the work of learning about and exploring moral harms in real time, not just for myself, but for other people, aiming to make sense of the pain we experience related to our moral lives.
July 10, 2025 at 4:13 AM
alyssaburgart.com
Season 2 of The Retrievals drops on July 10.

Back in 2023, I analyzed each episode in Season 1 - about untreated pain during egg retrievals for fertility care.

Before then, catch up at poppiesandpropofol.com for my analysis of all 5 episodes from season 1.
Doctors are sadists who like to play god and watch lesser people scream. - Allison Janney in Juno 2007
July 7, 2025 at 2:45 AM
alyssaburgart.com
The Minnesota assassin had a hit list of abortion providers and activists.

This is why I hammer HCWs about home security & digital privacy - esp those in abortion, vaccination, and trans care.

Check out the comments for my free guide to understanding and reducing your risk of doxxing.
Hit list was found in shooting suspect’s car with nearly 70 different targets, including abortion providers and lawmakers, officials say
June 14, 2025 at 10:10 PM
alyssaburgart.com
Today, Dr Jenn Conti and I wrote about Adriana Smith’s brain death diagnosis and how Georgia’s anti-abortion law treats women as little more than fetal incubators.

Having a uterus shouldn’t mean you get treated less human.

www.usnews.com/opinion/arti...
Georgia Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Force a Brain-Dead Woman's Body to Incubate a Fetus Why abortion bans violate medical ethics.
May 30, 2025 at 12:46 AM
alyssaburgart.com
The pain of an unethical situation is not all in your head.

Moral distress and moral injury show up in our bodies and behaviors. 💔
Examples of responses to moral distress
May 26, 2025 at 1:34 AM
alyssaburgart.com
I highly recommend reading the full medical board report on both David Geier (practicing without a license) and his dad - Mark Geier (physician whose license was revoked). The elder Geier died shortly before the younger Grier’s selection.

Links to both ⤵️
www.poppiesandpropofol.com/p/dr-christi...
So, during the largest measles outbreak in recent history, RFK Jr tapped a discredited anti-vaccine figure to study this already disproven link. David Geier — who lacks a medical degree and was previously sanctioned for practicing medicine without a license — is reportedly leading the effort. Geier and his father, Mark Geier3 (whose medical license was revoked in several states due to harming patients with dangerous autism “treatments”), have long promoted debunked claims that thimerosal, a vaccine preservative, causes autism.
May 12, 2025 at 2:21 PM
alyssaburgart.com
Laying in a hammock with Sierra, reading about polio and the dawn of modern intensive care.
Foreground - Sierra the Chihuahua. Background - The Autumn Ghost by Hannah Wunsch Me in a hammock with the dog and a book
May 11, 2025 at 5:26 PM
alyssaburgart.com
Thrilled to be back in Los Angeles for the Ethics of Caring conference.

The theme: Everyday Ethics Rooted in Trust

Investing in trust & trustworthiness in healthcare has never been more important.

Looking forward to learning & growing with these fabulous professionals. #ethics #bioethics #NNEC
Picture of my ethics of caring name badge
March 13, 2025 at 2:59 PM
alyssaburgart.com
We do not have the kind of patterned seasonality as with flu and RSV (winter peaks).
CDC graph: showing COVID is not limited to winter seasonality like other common respiratory illnesses. https://www.cdc.gov/ncird/whats-new/covid-19-can-surge-throughout-the-year.html
February 6, 2025 at 2:35 PM
alyssaburgart.com
And yet Dr Greg Murphy appears to be a full time congressperson…
Screenshot of a post from “congressman Greg Murphy, MD” : #1 reason for MD shortage is med schools admitting students who aren’t going to practice. Only 60% of med students today plan on practicing clinical medicine. Med schools need to focus on admitting students who want to take care of patients, not just get their MD”
January 29, 2025 at 10:56 PM
alyssaburgart.com
There is no justice in indiscriminately rounding up people solely on mere suspicion of an immigration violation.

1000s of citizens unlawfully deported since 2002.

Stories below are a sampling from Trump's first presidency. This is not justice.
www.latimes.com/archives/sto...
ICE held an American man in custody for 1,273 days. He’s not the only one who had to prove his citizenship The wrongful arrests account for a small fraction of the more than 100,000 arrests ICE makes each year, and it’s unclear whether the Trump administration’s aggressive push to increase deportations will lead to more mistakes. But the detentions of U.S. citizens amount to an unsettling type of collateral damage in the government’s effort to remove undocumented or unwanted immigrants. The errors reveal flaws in the way ICE identifies people for deportation, including its reliance on databases that are incomplete and plagued by mistakes. The wrongful arrests also highlight a presumption that pervades U.S. immigration agencies and courts that those born outside the United States are not here legally unless electronic records show otherwise. And when mistakes are not quickly remedied, citizens are forced into an immigration court system where they must fight to prove they should not be removed from the country, often without the help of an attorney. Federal policies require ICE agents to “carefully and expeditiously” investigate any claim of U.S. citizenship. But throughout his detention, Carrillo said, ICE officers either ignored or scoffed at his repeated claims. When his son rushed to the downtown booking facility with his father’s passport and citizenship certificate, ICE officers refused to consider the documents, he said. After he was moved to a privately run immigration detention center 85 miles outside Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert, Carrillo’s hope that ICE would quickly remedy its mistake gave way to a sense of despair. “Inmates were telling me, ‘You’re not going to see a judge for weeks. In here, you don’t have any rights,’ ” he said. “I started getting real scared: How long was I going to be in here? How could this be happening?”
January 28, 2025 at 3:06 AM
alyssaburgart.com
The majority of studies have been done in military and healthcare space. Many other professions have not been explicitly studied. Also data not collected similarly across studies makes comparisons challenging.
Below is an excerpt from healthcare.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Some evidence suggested that the risk of functionally-impairing moral injury was higher among women (versus men), younger (versus older) HCWs, nurses (versus physicians), those who worked more versus fewer hours, and providers with less experience [13]. Also, the risk of severe moral injury symptoms was lower among individuals who identified as religious/spiritual versus those who did not [14]. The impact of COVID-19 on these prevalence rates is unclear due to the paucity of prevalence estimates for HCW PMIE exposure and moral injury prior to COVID-19. Demonstrating the pandemic’s influence, rates of annual PMIE exposure in HCWs responding to the COVID-19 pandemic decreased from 56% in 2020 to 36% in 2022, when COVID-19 related hospitalizations, deaths, and shortages had declined [15].
January 27, 2025 at 2:54 AM
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Parent were surprised because this nurse was well liked by many families. Their favorite nurse.

Always a good reminder that likable is not equivalent with competent, compassionate, or caring.

You can like someone who betrays you. You can like someone who breaks your baby’s legs when you’re away.
“Twelve fractures on a baby?” Hackey said. “I couldn’t even fathom it. I looked at that father and we hugged and cried together.”
Hackey said he was shocked to learn of Strotman’s arrest, saying he remembered her as a kind nurse and had no concerns at the time about her care. He said he spoke with other victims’ families who had shown him photos they had taken with Strotman and text messages referring to her as their favorite nurse. (WaPo)
January 7, 2025 at 4:38 AM