James Maskalyk

M.D.
BornAlberta, Canada
OccupationMedical doctor, author, editor
LanguageEnglish
CitizenshipCanadian
Alma materUniversity of Alberta,
University of Calgary,
University of Toronto
SubjectEmergency medicine
Notable worksSix Months in Sudan
Life on the Ground Floor
Website
www.jamesmaskalyk.com

James Maskalyk is a Canadian emergency medicine physician, author, and meditation teacher.[1][2][3]

He works at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, and is the strategic director of Toronto-Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration in Emergency Medicine, which has frequently taken him to Ethiopia.[1][4] He is the executive editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

His work for Médecins sans Frontières in Abyei was the focus of his first memoir Six Months in Sudan,[5] which was nominated for, among others, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize with Aravind Adiga and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. His second book, Life on the Ground Floor won the 2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.[6]

Early life

Maskalyk was born in Alberta to parents who owned an lumber-planing business just outside of Edmonton.[2]

Education

In 1995, Maskalyk graduated with a degree in physiology from the University of Alberta where he studied gastrointestinal physiology and psychoneuroimmunology and won the Heritage Medical Research Award.[2]

Maskalyk graduated with a degree in medicine from the University of Calgary in 1999.[7] While studying, he did a medical elective in Santiago, studying cardiology and health system.[2] During his medical residency he worked in Cambodia with recently surrendered Khmer Rouge, providing primary care and helping the University of Toronto develop a medical elective where students and residents could study medicine in lower-resource settings.[2] Also, during his residency, he turned down an offer to study at Harvard University in order to do a writing fellowship at the Canadian Medical Association Journal,[2] where he also wrote the journal's first blog, in conjunction with Medecins Sans Frontieres, exploring why some diseases are neglected by the pharmaceutical industry.[8]

In 2004, Maskalyk qualified as an emergency specialist from the University of Toronto.[7]

Career

Maskalyk's 2014 paper on open medicine

Prior to becoming a physician, Maskalyk worked in a sawmill, as a courier, cleaner, security contractor, and disc-jockey.[2]

Maskalyk is an associate professor at University of Toronto's Faculty of Medicine,[9][7] and an emergency room physician and trauma team leader at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto.[1] He also works as a wellness coordinator for St. Michael's Hospital's staff.[10] He has been praised for highlighting the issue of drug interactions with grapefruit consumption,[11] and encouraging awareness of global health at all levels of university education.

Maskalyk has worked for Médecins sans Frontières in Dadaab refugee camp, Kenya,[10] and in 2007,[12] Abyei, Sudan.[13][14] He has also worked in Black Lion Hospital, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and is the strategic director of Toronto-Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration in Emergency Medicine, an institutional partnership designed to create the first system of emergency medicine in Addis Ababa.[4] He has also worked in Cambodia and Bolivia.[15][16]

Maskalyk was a founding editor of then open-source, open-access, medical journal Open Medicine.[17][18] He has spent has career looking at a systems approach to global equity in healthcare, and minimizing conflict of interest in researcher's contracts with industry.[19] Since 2022, he has been the executive editor in chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.[20]

His writing on global issues has appeared in The Washington Post,[21] and The Globe and Mail where he wrote a diary describing the early days of the COVID19 pandemic in Canada.[22] He has collaborated with Turtle Lodge to address inequities in healthcare experienced by Canada's indigenous people.[23]

Maskalyk hosts regular public events on Facebook, where he leads meditation sessions and conversations about a wide rage of topics including sex, alcohol, kindness, existentialism, exercise, economics, computer modelling, and death.[10]

Books

Six Months in Sudan

Originally written as the first ever official blog for Médecins Sans Frontières, Six Months in Sudan was adapted into the 2009 autobiographical memoir of Maskalyk's work in the village of Abyei in Sudan.[24] Treating illness, disease and trauma from vehicle collisions and violence, Maskalyk is overwhelmed by heat, exhaustion, and his own emotional struggles facing an overwhelming gap between healthcare needs and the capacity his colleagues can offer.[5]

Life on the Ground Floor

In 2017, Maskalyk released his second autobiographical memoir Life on the Ground Floor, in which he shares stories about his work in emergency departments in Canada, Ethiopia, Cambodia and Bolivia.[25][26][27] The book has 26 chapters, A through Z, each an unusual perspective of working in an emergency department.[15] Life on the Ground Floor won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust for Nonfiction award, Canada's largest non-fiction award, in 2017 and has been translated into many languages.[6]

Doctor, Heal Thyself

Maskalyk has been working on his third book Doctor, Heal Thyself, writing about western, Traditional Chinese and Indigenous medicine.[1]

Personal life

He has a younger brother, Dan.[2]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Doctor who helped people meditate through pandemic fears diagnosed with stage 4 cancer". CBC. 27 Oct 2020.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Sibbald, Barbara (2002-10-29). "Emergency MD becomes CMAJ's fifth editorial fellow". CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal. 167 (9): 1045. ISSN 0820-3946. PMC 134194.
  3. ↑ "The Current's new year party brings you laughter, live music, and some people you'll want to meet! by The Current". Podchaser. Retrieved 2021-12-15.
  4. 1 2 "Spruce Grove-born doctor, James Maskalyk, releases his second memoir, makes best-seller list". sprucegroveexaminer. Retrieved 2021-12-15.
  5. 1 2 SIX MONTHS IN SUDAN | Kirkus Reviews.
  6. 1 2 Patrick, Ryan B (20 Sep 2017). "Terese Marie Mailhot, Elizabeth Hay among finalists for $60K Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction". CBC.
  7. 1 2 3 Barclay, James Andrew (2011-12-02). "At the heart of the problem". BMJ. 343: d6429. doi:10.1136/sbmj.d6429. ISSN 1756-1833. S2CID 164667420.
  8. ↑ Choi, Stephen (2005-04-12). "A call to bloggers (not a running group)". CMAJ. 172 (8): 1024–1025. doi:10.1503/cmaj.050315. ISSN 0820-3946. PMC 556041. PMID 15824408.
  9. ↑ Salinas, Carlos C. (2021-03-03). "Covid-19, vaccines, and the environment". The Manila Times. Retrieved 2021-12-15.
  10. 1 2 3 White, Patrick (2020-04-08). "Doctor at Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital wins online following for COVID-19 updates, guided meditations". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2021-12-15.
  11. ↑ Spence, J. D. (15 October 2002). "Drug interactions with grapefruit". Canadian Medical Association Journal. 167 (8): 848. PMC 128389. PMID 12406936.
  12. ↑ Kaplan, Jonathan (2009-04-15). "A place where dreams turn to dust". BMJ. 338: b1489. doi:10.1136/bmj.b1489. ISSN 0959-8138. S2CID 72478687.
  13. ↑ "Six Months in Sudan". CBC. 9 Jan 2019.
  14. ↑ Roedde, Gretchen (2009-04-28). "Making sense of the senseless". CMAJ. 180 (9): 955–956. doi:10.1503/cmaj.090593. ISSN 0820-3946. PMC 2670916. S2CID 71217435.
  15. 1 2 "Opinion | A master of the medical memoir". The Toronto Star. 2017-11-21. ISSN 0319-0781. Retrieved 2021-12-15.
  16. ↑ "The best Canadian nonfiction of 2017". CBC. 19 Dec 2017.
  17. ↑ "James Maskalyk | Writers' Trust of Canada". James Maskalyk | Writers' Trust of Canada. Retrieved 2021-12-15.
  18. ↑ "Canadian medical journal, Open Medicine, stops publishing". 4 Nov 2014.
  19. ↑ Rochon, Paula A; Sekeres, Melanie; Hoey, John; Lexchin, Joel; Ferris, Lorraine E; Moher, David; Wu, Wei; Kalkar, Sunila R; Van Laethem, Marleen; Gruneir, Andrea; Gold, Jennifer (2011-01-12). "Investigator experiences with financial conflicts of interest in clinical trials". Trials. 12: 9. doi:10.1186/1745-6215-12-9. ISSN 1745-6215. PMC 3031202. PMID 21226951.
  20. ↑ "Ten great things that happened this week". Unity Health Toronto. 2022-10-06. Retrieved 2022-12-09.
  21. ↑ Maskalyk, James (2011-08-04). "Paul Farmer's "Haiti: After the Earthquake"". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2022-03-14.
  22. ↑ Maskalyk, James (2020-04-24). "The doctor's diary: Coronavirus dispatches from an ER physician in Toronto". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2022-03-14.
  23. ↑ "Opinion: Indigenous communities are denied the most important medicine people can receive: Kindness". The Globe and Mail. 2021-02-19. Retrieved 2022-03-14.
  24. ↑ Woodward, Richard B. (2009-06-16). "Book Review: 'Six Months in Sudan: A Young Doctor in a War-Torn Village'". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-12-17.
  25. ↑ André Picard (2017-04-13). "James Maskalyk's Life on the Ground Floor, reviewed: Why emergency medicine is the great equalizer". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2021-12-14.
  26. ↑ Patrick, Ryan B (19 Oct 2017). "Why James Maskalyk wanted to explore the human side of emergency medicine". CBC.
  27. ↑ Pal, Nicole E. (2017-07-03). "Life on the ground floor: letters from the edge of emergency medicine". Medicine, Conflict and Survival. 33 (3): 232–234. doi:10.1080/10796126.2017.1384531. ISSN 1362-3699. PMID 28994316. S2CID 45108448.
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