Author's posts
This physician stuck himself with a needle. Intentionally.
I stuck myself with a hypodermic needle the other day. Intentionally. The first time in over 25 years of doctoring. More surprising, a six-year-old patient told me to do it, so I had to. The boy, who I’ll call Tyler, came to the office with his father and had a large ganglion cyst on the […]
Do your children know what you do?
The wizards have determined that an important monitor for the eventual success of your children is … drum roll please … whether or not the family eats dinner together. How prosaic. At first glance, this seems counterintuitive. What about private school, tutoring, soccer camp, circumnavigating the earth solo? Those activities all pale against the family […]
How many bones in the human body? It’s not what you think.
If somebody asks you how many bones there are in a human body, please do not blurt out, “206.” The correct answer is nuanced. To respond accurately to the query, you have to address five questions. Who? What? When? Where? Why? Consider first that humans vary from one another in facial features, hair color, height, […]
The human hand: not really that good for anything
Long ago primitive sharks had ridges running down their sides from gill to tail. Later, muscles grew into the folds, and eventually, the central portion of each ridge receded while the ends enlarged to form fins both fore and aft. All was well. Then one day several hundred million years ago, a fish was swimming blissfully […]
Who named our bones? And what were they thinking?
All of our 200+ bones have names, which facilitates describing them when we cannot actually hold them or point directly at them. It might be easier to remember the names if they were familiar ones like Robert, Sally, and Kevin, but no such luck. Latin was the original language of science, so the bones received […]
