Dr. Qanta Ahmed is the author of In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom. She is an attending physician based in the Division of Pulmonary, Sleep and Critical Care Medicine at Winthrop University Hospital in Mineola, New York, and a fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. She now practices sleep medicine exclusively in Garden City, Long Island. Previously she has practiced in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, in the National Guard Health Affairs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and in the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, SC.

Blog Entries by Qanta Ahmed, MD

Guests of God: 2.5 Million Muslims Worship in Makkah, Saudi Arabia in This Year's Hajj

1 Comments | Posted November 19, 2009 | 03:30 PM (EST)


They will arrive from over 160 countries; many have already departed for their journey as I write. Some are old, some young, some unborn, some about to leave this life and go into the next. They will all come, however, just as the Qu’ran predicted: “on every kind of camel”....

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From Wall Street to Neverland: The Year America Didn't Sleep

13 Comments | Posted November 16, 2009 | 11:11 AM (EST)


America didn’t just lose money in the Crash -- America lost a lot of sleep. The annual Sleep in America Poll published by the National Sleep Foundation focused on Health and Safety this year. The report is available on line for anyone to download. It makes for compelling reading.

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Cairo to Fort Hood: Broader Engagement at Home and Abroad

11 Comments | Posted November 11, 2009 | 06:01 AM (EST)


Armistice Day, Atlanta, Georgia


The atrocious mass murder committed last week at Fort Hood has shaken the nation.  Unusually, I didn’t learn of the news until many hours later, spared from the continuous news cycle in transit from the West Coast to New York. When I finally reconnected...

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Sleepless Supernova: Propofol Lullabies In Neverland

112 Comments | Posted October 1, 2009 | 02:32 PM (EST)


Michael Jackson's death is already a fading memory despite an acute expression of global despair as we witnessed the untimely extinction of a supernova. For physicians, struggling against a climate of national examination in this era of healthcare reform, there is a distinctly darker anguish which must finally be examined,...

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Invisible Women at Work: Meet Maha Al-Muneef, the Gloria Steinem of Arabia

1 Comments | Posted May 23, 2009 | 02:08 PM (EST)


Earlier this month, I was invited to comment on the Saudi judge who condoned wife-slapping as appropriate punishment for a spendthrift wife, first reported in the Arab News. The comment (made at a conference for academics at a symposium on domestic violence in Saudi Arabia) engendered a sharp intake of...

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