I was moved watching Tim Russert’s memorial service yesterday.  We both grew up in Buffalo and rooted for the Bills, regardless of outcome.  We never met, but we share common values, including:

the importance of family
a sense of spiritual connectedness
optimism
a focus on communication and relationships as a central source of meaning and joy
the pleasure of story-telling
preservation [...]

“We’re not stupid- we just need to be trained,” a general surgery section chief confided to me a few years ago.  He had been promoted to section chief based on his clinical competence and then realized that he needed to communicate, negotiate, and resolve conflicts in ways that he had never learned in medical school [...]

 Anybody who has worked with physicians has heard the comment, “Organizing doctors is like herding cats; you just get scratched.”
When I finished business school a decade ago, a physician asked me, “What is the difference between business school and medical school?”
I replied, “There was a lot more memorization in medical school than business school. Also, 30-50% [...]

I admit feeling clueless as I travel on average 100,000 miles per year, listening to physicians tell stories about the ongoing tensions of providing care in a dynamic marketplace.  The word “hospitalist,” referring to physicians who specialize in inpatient care, was not coined until 1996 (Wachter and Goldman, New England Journal of Medicine, 335(7):514-17).  It may [...]