Posts Tagged ‘healing’
Focus On The Story
In a couple of weeks, I’ll once again be in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the University of Virginia speaking to a group of highly-motivated students who want to be doctors. What I’ll tell them will have very little to do with biology and science, although we will talk a bit about that. Mostly, I’ll be telling…
Read MoreMore Hope For The Future
I spent a very pleasant afternoon yesterday in Wichita Falls, Texas, where I spoke to the Pre-Health Society at Midwestern State University. I was very impressed with this group of mostly premedical students. They were attentive and asked important questions about what the proper motivations should be to enter the medical profession. We talked about…
Read MoreBack In Balance
Last time, I wrote about how healing is unique and individual, and how therapies that purists may claim have no basis in science may nevertheless be effective in some people. Since my last post, I have seen that thesis reinforced in spades, but I will save that story for another day. This morning, for the…
Read MoreThe Absence Of Evidence Should Not Deter Healing
A good friend of mine speaks frequently about medical decision-making, and often quotes the astronomer Carl Sagan, who said, “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” That quote has broader application to the work of caring for patients with illness, I think, and its applicability can be illustrated using myself as an example.…
Read MoreDecline: Unsafe At Any Speed
I’m rereading Atul Gawande’s wonderful book Being Mortal, in preparation for a panel discussion that I’m participating in this April. Gawande talks about the decline that everyone undergoes as they advance in age, and how at some point, the decline simply overwhelms our ability to adapt, and we can no longer care for ourselves. I’ve…
Read MoreWhat’s Hurricane Got To Do With It?
My second novel, Back Side Of A Hurricane, is currently being shopped to publishers. When people ask me about it, I usually hear something like, “Oh, it isn’t about medicine? I thought you wrote medical stories.” Well, no–I write stories. Some are medical, some not. “Hurricane” is primarily about the relationship between fathers and their…
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