I had the pleasure of driving to the Berkshires in MA with the Road Scholars this Summer. Over the course of about a week I was privileged to see live dance, theatre, and orchestral performance at a concentration of venues, Jacob’s Pillow, Berkshire Theatre and Tanglewood, Summer home the Boston Symphony. I came to appreciate how dedicated are…

On one hand we have no instance where there has been any conscious interaction or communication without the aid of a living body. As the body, especially the brain, becomes affected, there always seems to more impaired interaction with the environment. Also all interaction ceases after the death of the body, so it seems clear…

I was talking with a colleague who’d come to the US for training, about the Malaysian passenger plane over the Ukraine. Nothing seemed more obvious to me than the deliberate downing of a civilian airplane causing nearly three hundred innocent deaths is far beneath any standard of human behavior. I was particularly incensed as I…

Sex and Death promote diversity, the basis of life. A woman in her 60s brought in her mother with frequent falls. Her mom was increasingly debilitated and not able to walk without falling and was confused in her thinking and verbal expression. Drilling down on the history, the patient had stereotypical epileptic seizures preceded by…

After delivering graduation speech as principal of a Catholic school a woman I examined thought something so terribly wrong that she petitioned the Monsignor to give her last rights before coming to the hospital. She confessed to him three separate times not recalling she’d already done so.   She felt disoriented. She is an intelligent…

Working with an Iranian colleague I like to talk a lot and we got along well. I did have the impression we were both educated moderates.  I do get excited about music. On the way into work I was listening to Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and unsatisfied about not hearing the whole thing the first…

I was affected by asthma as a young child and was pretty short of breath a lot of the time, not able to run that well or keep up with my friends riding a bike. My determination to beat this physical limitation not only lead to a life in medicine,  but caused me to engage…

I just saw Mozart’s Opera Don Giovanni at the Philadelphia Opera. I hope I am spoiling the opera for anyone when I say that Don Giovanni is sent directly into hell. He does not get the break that Faust does.  Giovanni is not what you would consider a nice person. He is mostly a rake,…

As a newly minted medical resident I wrote orders for antibiotics and cultures for a sick patient with pneumonia.  That night I happened to be on call.  I was chagrined when nurses awoke me at 2 AM to ask about something they had trouble deciphering. They had just gotten to taking off orders from 17…

If you Google a physician’s name,  you are likely to find as the first, second and third offerings, descriptions by doctor rating intermediaries. Those come well before biographies from the physician’s employer.  If your doctor is published or well- known, ratings by these agencies still  pop up first on web searches, because they have arranged…