Sublime

With cardiac surgeons, a group of researchers recently figured out how to detect when the most senior cardiac surgeons were at conferences, and found that the death rates went down while the most senior cardiac surgeons were away.9

I tried to think what could be accomplished in this visit. She was in good condition for her age, but she faced everything from advancing arthritis and incontinence to what might be metastatic colon cancer. It seemed to me that, with just a forty-minute visit, Bludau needed to triage by zeroing in on either the most potentially life-threatening pro

Most of the drugs currently used to treat cancer are toxic poisons. Radiation, also used to treat cancer, kills if the dose is too high. Many therapeutic advances entail trying to get the chemical substances or the radiation focused more precisely on the cancerous cells, sparing the healthy tissue, in the recognition that you need the poison but wa

Doctors invade the body in every way imaginable. They see people at their most vulnerable, their most scared, their most private. They escort them into the world, and then back out. Seeing the body as matter and mechanism is the flip side to easing the most profound human suffering.