Doctor Patient Magic

All great stories include magic. Characters dance around rules or constructs that define their world.

For example:

Guess my name and you may keep your child.

Find love before the last pedal falls or remain a Beast forever.

Never say the name of he-who-must-not-be-named, or Death Eaters will find us.

Magic applies to non-fiction, too. We buy books about real, faulty people who win despite their flaws.

We want stories about people struggling and limited in the same way that gravity limits us. Limits and faults make real life and fairy tales come alive. Gravity is magic by another name; no one knows what it is.

Doctor Patient Magic

Medicine has its own magic, the doctor patient relationship, that defines and controls medicine every bit as much as gravity rules us. Continue reading “Doctor Patient Magic”

How to Energize Your Career or Change It Completely

A colleague one town over died recently. After 50 years, he had a huge practice.

His patients say that he often called them on Sundays with results. He loved medicine.

He saw 40 patients one day and died the next.

Doctors used to work until they got too blind or dull to carry on. Seeing more patients was the best way to shake off malaise and stay energized. It gave instant rewards, decent pay and didn’t feel like work most of the time.

Today, old docs say that young docs don’t want to work. The old-timers are partly right, but for the wrong reasons.

Very few doctors can survive old-time clinical medicine: 60 hours a week for 50 years. Modern clinical medicine has too little medicine left in it. Continue reading “How to Energize Your Career or Change It Completely”

Doctor Derangement Syndrome

Some people hate cows.

Cow haters often have good reasons for feeling so.

Perhaps they had a bad experience with a scary cow. Now they tell everyone that cows are smelly and bad for your health.

Occasionally, cow haters pretend to support the dairy industry, but only if it leads to increased regulation of cows in general:

Cows are such a precious resource that we need government to control them.

Other people love cows above all else and put them centre stage at every state fair. They push for more pasture, just for cattle. They re-write food guides to support the dairy industry.

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Some people hate doctors.

No doubt, doctor-haters have deep reasons for feeling so. Perhaps they had a bad experience with a scary doctor.

Now, they write nasty columns in the Toronto Star about doctors. All the inspiration they need is a tweet, by a famously unpopular Premier from the 1990s. Continue reading “Doctor Derangement Syndrome”