We need to ask hard questions about the dramatic disparities in health care spending that can be seen around the nation.    

The impetus for this month’s column was a recent interaction at a social gathering in a university town. The conversation, as is common in such settings, was steeped in cultural relativism, proclaiming the brilliance of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault and how everyone would be better off if the intelligentsia ran the country.

In Part I of a new series, Drs. Greg Henry and Mel Herbert discuss the role of technology in medical education

Barely had the last edition of Emergency Physicians Monthly reached mailboxes when I began to hear from everyone who took offense at the idea that our research needs to be reexamined. I heard from both my friends and my enemies, and at my age they all start to look alike. They are the faces you can recognize at emergency medicine cocktail parties, the usual collection of limousine liberals who feel they are entitled to research dollar and academic protected time.

Spring in the great lakes region gives us renewal; the snows melt and the green returns to the land. Not the ever-present dull green of tropical climes which languishes in perpetual middle age, but a vibrant rebirth which refreshes the ground, our bodies and our minds.

Emergency doctors are the ultimate in the practical; we do everything with nothing, and we make things work. And yet, here I sit, reading and dissecting a series of malpractice cases which are based on the lack of common sense.

A new physician-written book sheds much-needed common sense on end-of-life care in the ED. “The Spirit that is in all beings is immortal in them all: for the death of what cannot die, cease thou to sorrow.”

Applying physics lessons to daily life in the emergency department has never been more enjoyable.
“God does not play dice with the universe”

Democracy, like love, is often blind, lacking cool objectivity and critical distance. But the deepest truths are written in braille. If the directions which our profession should take are not felt, they are not truly internalized. This country is in trouble, and I’m a patriot. But a true patriot weeps more than he brags.

A Samuel Beckett play is somewhat like a confession without hope of absolution. A sense of sin that lies too deep to be expiated. Past societal guilt about present actions continue and such remorse is denied relief. Beckett’s characters reach out for affection, and frustratingly embrace only the tormented feelings of themselves.