Every so often, I hear or see something that reminds me that I do not always do what I advise clients to do.  So today, I confess that even though I remind clients to write thank-you notes to colleagues who help them achieve their goals, I have not done so for months.  Nor will I bore you with [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

Last week, hospitals across the US celebrated National Nurses Week, which led me to recall with gratitude nurses who made a difference in my training and kept me from harming patients. What better place to start than internship?
I salute Nikki, a nurse on the 7PM to 7AM shift in the Emergency Department of a community [...]

Last week, while I was teaching at the Estes Park Institute, I had the pleasure to listen to my friend and mentor, Lee Kaiser.  Lee is a psychologist, futurist, and provocateur with a cherubic face, booming voice, and razor-sharp intellect.  I make every effort to hear him speak because I find his insights centering and stimulating.  [...]

A sign in my office proclaims, “It’s never too late to change what you want to be when you grow up.”
The women in my family understand all too well that men can take decades longer than women to reach maturity.  Clearly, the song in Peter Pan, “I’ll never grow up,” became a classic because it [...]

Nick Jacob’s blog post, So You Want to Be A CEO Part Eleven, resonated with me today as I covered general surgery in a rural Vermont hospital.
It was a typical Sunday morning, as I set out to make rounds on the medical-surgical floor, learning that a medical patient in the ICU with a previously tiny pneumothorax now [...]

It seemed like such an easy task that day on rounds.  I was a first-year surgical resident asked to remove a central venous catheter that was no longer necessary for monitoring.  No one asked whether I had slept the previous night on call (I hadn’t); this was a task that could be performed at a [...]

At my birthday dinner in downtown Boston, my 17-year old daughter surprised me at the end of the meal with, “So old man, what have you learned in half a century?”
Knowing that we had only one car and that I had the keys, I mused, “First, when I finished my residency, I was consumed about [...]

During residency, I was called to the Operating Room in the middle of the night.  As I entered the room, I noted that an anesthesiologist was not present.  I had been summoned to remove the corneas of a patient who had died, so that they could be available for corneal transplant before the body was [...]