Tag: medicine

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere now.  It is too late to decide whether or not to use it. But we can determine how we use it and the quality we are in when we use it.

In Medicine, when people are struggling, especially when it comes to colleagues and peers, there seems to be a willful blindness to the fact that something is wrong, and that someone is struggling and needs help and support.

We all have stories about how we came to be doctors … but have we ever stopped to consider that we may be doctors by design? That our path may be prepared for us and that there is a plan for us that unfolds, sometimes in spite of our ‘selves’ rather than because of us?

We all have blind spots in our fields of vision, that can be mapped. This is a known fact in Medicine. What is not so well known or accepted is that we as doctors also have blind spots, not just in our visual fields but in our perceptions of life, that are influenced by our beliefs and ideals.

I attended a function last night in the town where I live and work, at which we hosted our young doctors and talked to...

What do we mean when we say that medicine is a ‘calling’? And what implications does that have for the way we practice medicine and the way we live our lives?

Medicine is an apprenticeship system and like all such systems, works best if the masters train their apprentices not just in a functional way, but with a deep level of care, as people and as colleagues. We now call this process mentoring.

Medicine is all about relationships. It is about caring for people, after all. So why do we place so little focus on this vital element of our profession?

One dimension of my daily work that I really enjoy is interviewing applicants to medical school. I’m often tasked with interviewing a specific group of applicants, the ones who openly write that they have suffered from mental health symptoms in the past.

Would a return to an ‘innermost’ way of life, a heart-centred intelligence and awareness, be something we as physicians, could consider?