Dr. Leon Rivlin was on the front lines during the SARS outbreak in 2003, but says the current coronavirus pandemic is nothing like that. “We’ve never seen a virus like this before because it’s spreading without people even having symptoms ..
it’s not like our experience with SARS,” he said, from a busy ambulance bay outside Humber River Hospital in Mississauga. Dr.
Rivlin is now the Chief and Medical Director of Emergency Medicine at the hospital, but also specializes in chronic pain and spends a great deal of time with patients at his pain clinic, Rivlin Medical Group.
Ensuring chronic pain sufferers are not forgotten during the pandemic is a priority for him. “In some cases it means we provide tele-medicine calls where we’re managing the