Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But the truth is, it does not bend on its own. It bends because people pull it toward justice- through action, through courage, and most of all, through empathy.
Right now, it feels like we’re living in a time of accelerating entropy. The momentum that once drove progress is dissipating- like energy lost to friction- fading into something less useful, something harder to reclaim. But is this process inevitable?
What if we paused and asked ourselves these three questions:
1. Is there a reasonable chance this will resolve on its own?
2. Am I certain this is truly a problem?
3. What is the opportunity cost of acting to solve this right now?
What is the goal of a hospital? All too often, different members of an organization have different goals, to the detriment of patient care and healthcare systems as a whole.
It’s all too easy to blame physicians for everything that is wrong with healthcare today. We are the most visible, the top of the medical food chain, it would appear. Except, we aren’t.
When you spend most of your time with children- as I’ve inexplicably chosen both personally and professionally to do- you begin to notice that ninety percent of their waking hours are spent asking questions.
Mindset is an essential quality in a physician. The practice of medicine requires constantly stretching oneself and thus requires doctors to actively embrace challenge.
When I had my son, the gaps between the worlds of pediatrics and parenting became painfully evident. Suddenly, so much of the advice I had been trained to give felt lacking the essential component of HOW?
Reset buttons are ubiquitous. They allow us to restore a system to its original state of functioning when it has developed programming errors, become overheated, or flat out short circuited. Being the complex operating systems we are, there are times when we, too, need a reset.
It’s been said that ancient cartographers used to write HIC SVNT LEONES (Here are lions) to indicate unknown territories on their maps. I sympathize. Being in the dark about where we are headed stirs all kinds of deep-rooted fears about what may lie in wait in the uncharted places beyond.
