HERZOG & DE MEURON

Journal of Cellular Biochemistry, 1988

Academia Medicine, 2023

This case study focuses on the evaluation of a patient with both upper and lower gastrointestinal (GI) complaints in the outpatient setting, that is, how the evaluation skipped over several crucial diagnostic steps, and how this impacted the patient. Special care is given to the patient’s perspective, differential diagnosis, recommended laboratory testing, and their corresponding costs, taking on a patient-centered approach to the evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment of illness. In this case, sufficient medication history was not obtained, causing the patient to undergo an expensive and unnecessary procedure. Acquiring this information is the cornerstone of an effective patient-physician relationship. Based on the history, a standardized diagnostic approach can be employed, given the likelihood of certain diagnoses. Often, the workup should start with less invasive and expensive tests. However, it is important to consider each isolated case, as a more aggressive approach may be indicated in certain instances. Special attention to communication between the patient and provider is key in ensuring that the patient understands what is happening in their medical care, which improves their communication with relevant information to the care provider, and through such understanding, our patients are better able to provide informed consent.

Tishreen University Journal- Economic and Legal Sciences Series, 2015

Religions, 2023

Although the Bahāʾī Faith was born in a Shīʿī Islamic cultural milieu it has clearly gone beyond the “gravitational pull” of Islām and assumed a distinctive social, scriptural, and religious identity. Bahāʾīs revere Islām as “the source and background of their Faith” and consider the Qurʾān the only authentic, uncorrupted scripture apart from their own. However, Bahāʾī teachings insist that this new religious movement is more than a sectarian development. It represents a distinctive—if you will “autonomous”—religious dispensation along the lines of the development of Christianity out of its original Jewish setting. This assertion and trajectory is clear in the very earliest scriptures of the new religion revealed by the Bāb and runs through subsequent Bahāʾī writings. A key term, badīʿ , used dozens of times by the Bāb in his annunciatory composition, the Qayyūm al-Asmāʾ), denotes this sense of the “wondrously new”, something that is simultaneously ancient and unprecedented. It is suggested here that this term is a central and pivotal idea in the Bāb’s vision and that it had a major role in generating the imaginative and kerygmatic cultural energy that would eventually result in the above-mentioned escape from an Islamic orbit. The word badīʿ eventually acquires a life of its own in Bahāʾī thought and practice. It is the word used to designate the new calendar whose current year is 180 B.E., “Bahāʾī Era” or “Badīʿ Era”. It is used in the title of one of Bahāʾuʾllāh’s major books, the Kitāb-i Badāʿ . It is given as a name for one of the young heroes of the Bahāʾī Faith who was tortured and killed because he dared to attempt to communicate directly with the Shah of Iran to testify to the truth of Bahāʾuʾllāh’s mission. It is a word encountered frequently throughout the Bahāʾī writings and translated various ways. It functions as an emblem and symbol of the Bahāʾī ethos and message. The main focus here is the Qayyūm al-Asmāʾ, the Bāb’s proclamatory summons, disguised as a Qurʾān commentary, in which he claimed to be in immediate and intimate contact with the hidden Imām and, therefore, the centre of all authority (walāya) whether political or spiritual. The clarion message of the Qayyūm al-Asmāʾ), in which the much repeated Arabic word badīʿ is a powerful and vibrant symbol of “the new”, is that a profound and radical covenantal renewal—as distinct from “revivification/tajdīd”—is at hand, a renewal that would evolve into a distinctive Bahāʾī communal identity that is simultaneously—and therefore wondrously—new and primordial.

Academic Curriculum Vitae (updated September 2024).