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This summer was a long one for our family. My daughter had an emergency surgery for a ruptured appendix. After three weeks and two hospitalizations, she was sent home with a catheter for self-administering intravenous antibiotics. My wife and I moved into her apartment to help. Just two and a half weeks after we flew home, my wife had a sudden onset of intense abdominal pain, followed by emergency surgery for an obstructed colon. Despite ...

A former boss of mine, Kenneth Smithson, MD, lost a year-long battle with cancer on June 27. I was unaware that he had been ill, as we had not worked together for a number of years and our interactions had dwindled with time. Yet the day he died, my inbox was inundated with e-mails informing me of his passing, largely because I had not been shy in telling others of the great influence he had ...

Most people who work in health care have so many demands on their time that they are hard-pressed just to care for patients, enter data into the electronic record and race off to yet another meeting. Despite the findings in studies of quality, safety, efficiency and service excellence that teamwork and collaboration result in better outcomes, health professionals tend to restrict their professional circle to those with similar responsibilities and backgrounds. They just don’t have ...

I am not generally a fan of reality television shows, which are mostly about eavesdropping on the private lives of people in troubling situations. That said, I have become a pretty devoted fan of the Discovery Channel’s real-life account of the dangers and work of crab fishermen in Alaska – Deadliest Catch – which premiered in 2005. A recent government study found that commercial fishermen had the most dangerous job in the United States, with ...