“My mother, bless her ninety-year-old heart, is slowing down. The things that made her happiest — getting to church, visiting friends, taking walks, and wandering the aisles in the grocery store —are increasingly difficult. She worries that her l…
Category: surgery
Do you have any idea how beautiful you are on the inside?
Do you have any idea how beautiful you are? Well, OK; maybe for some it’s were. Before you got a little thick in the middle, smoked, or even just breathed city air for enough years, or drank a little, or did a few drugs, there was a time — …
Do you have any idea how beautiful you are on the inside?
Do you have any idea how beautiful you are? Well, OK; maybe for some it’s were. Before you got a little thick in the middle, smoked, or even just breathed city air for enough years, or drank a little, or did a few drugs, there was a time — …
Protein calorie malnutrition is devastating for patients
I am a former chief of surgery and a scientific entrepreneur. My practice consisted of patients who suffered from serious injuries and illnesses. Concerning the latter, a significant number had cancer, especially breast cancer. The issue all patient …
Ode to a little bile bag
Surgery to remove the gallbladder is a relatively late intervention. The first laparotomy was performed in 1807 in Danville, Kentucky, and surgeons like Billroth and Kocher, were removing thyroids and even parts of the esophagus as early as the 1870s;…
Robotic surgery’s impact on training the next generation of surgeons [PODCAST]
“Technology continues to evolve every day. In the near-term future, portable and easily deployable robots will allow surgeons all over the world to perform minimally invasive surgery in an increasing number of procedure types and become even more…
The necessity for the globalization of surgery and its barriers
For years, the surgical practice has been an essential medicine to treat many diseases, such as benign lesions or neoplasms, deliveries, cesarean sections, infections, obstructions, bleeds, and cardiovascular diseases. In many cases, the standard of ca…
Racial disparities in surgical care [PODCAST]
“As a practicing surgeon for 30 years in the super-specialized field of otology, neurotology and skull base surgery, I have been privy to some of the most disturbing realities of surgical care. Often, these realities are bleaker than most people …
A data-first strategy to recovering surgical volumes [PODCAST]
“The first step to hospital recovery is the collection and analysis of data. Organizations that effectively leverage data to optimize surgery can see rapid, quantifiable, and sustained improvements in metrics that directly link to operational eff…
A neurosurgeon’s lessons on love, loss, and compassion [PODCAST]
“Dehumanizing patients can lead to indifference in physicians. It is a privilege to be trusted to take care of every patient we encounter, yet we can lose sight of this and begin to see our patients as a burden, or as units of work, rather than a…
