December 29, 2014

Are Today’s New Surgeons Unprepared?

The surgeon had no prestigious named professorship, no N.I.H. grant and no plum administrative position in the hospital’s hierarchy. But to the other surgeons-in-training and me, he was exactly who we wanted to be. A decade or two earlier, he had started out like us,
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December 29, 2014

Are Med School Grads Prepared to Practice Medicine?

One night early in my internship, I received a frantic page for help from a fellow intern. Seasoned nurses had been unable to draw a patient’s blood, which senior doctors had ordered be done if his fever spiked, so they’d called the covering doctor, the
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December 29, 2014

Emergency Rooms Are No Place for the Elderly

The elderly man lived alone in an apartment complex not far from the hospital. A younger neighbor, who’d watched him hobble down the building’s stairwell for nearly a week, insisted on taking him to the emergency room. Doctors there immediately diagnosed an infection in his
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