One of the central tenets of the patient safety movement is that modern medicine is a team sport. Unfortunately, its players – particularly physicians – were trained and socialized to be free-spirited individualists. We need the Celtics of the 80s; what we have is a collection of young John McEnroes. While this theory has been [...]
Archive | October, 2010
Tugging on Superman’s Cape
Several years ago, I spoke at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where Michael DeBakey, the legendary heart surgeon, was master of the universe for nearly half a century. I heard lots of DeBakey stories during my visit, but one in particular really stuck with me. “A few years back,” someone told me in a [...]
“What is… Wegener’s Granulomatosis?”
A terrific article in The New York Times Magazine this summer described the decade-long effort on the part of IBM artificial intelligence researchers to build a computer that can beat humans in the game of “Jeopardy!” Since I’m not a computer scientist, their pursuit struck me at first as, well, trivial. But as I read [...]
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