I brought the thriller The Secret History with me during the Beijing trip. That's the recommendation from my daughter who has just read Donna Tartt's novel.

In the first chapter, I met a boy of twenty-eight years old from California; he went to study at New England where he joined a Greek course with four other classmates.

Getting to know five characters seemed tough for me. All of them could be smoking cigarettes and using drugs, and most of them are Greek to me. When

When Machu Picchu stands as the miraculous citadel in South America, the Great Wall of China is the counterpart, if not more imposing, in Asia. Breathtaking it is. With its pristine watchtowers and multi-function walls stretching thousands of kilometre across the historic frontier, the Great Wall is the ultimate bucket-list adventure for many.

My first out-of-town trip was when I visited the capital city of China at the age of nineteen. The Great Wall is so impressive it's worth a

Life is a busy box of chocolates. Some are sweet, and many are nutty.

You wake on a Monday morning and stare at the never-ending to-do list. The stifling weather and unanswered emails conspire like a tough examiner. You may be consumed by feelings of the damn busy schedule. Before you can make another complaint or curse, you find out you have a brain tumour. That means a long surgery, after which you can no longer breathe on your own without a tube running down your

There is a book Clinical Neurology written by someone called Russell Brain? Seriously. There is one, and people call it Brain's Clinical Neurology .

I heard about this book when I read The Names , a New York Times best-selling debut novel by Florence Knapp. The novel has three storylines, each of which depends on how a mother names her son: Bear, Julian, and Gordon.

The idea that people gravitate toward areas of work that match their name is known as nominative determinism or aptronym.

Animals are amazing natural healers. So much so that we have a concept called zoopharmacognosy, a term entirely new to me until I picked up the book Doctors by Nature .

Examples are plentiful to show that animals are innately knowledgeable about their body need and the self-medication with natural remedies. Offering our patients antibiotics is an easy way to deal with bacterial infection, but the problem of disturbing the gut microbiome ensues. Once our patients develop inflammation caused by Clostrioides difficile , the highly contagious and nasty bacteria can quickly take

Tell me what you think of when you hear the name John Green. Most probably his novel The Fault in Our Stars , which has sold more than 23 million copies worldwide.

I'll tell you what I think of: a boy with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. His name is Henry. He lives in Sierra Leone, and has got open sores in his neck and shoulder from ruptured lymph nodes, yellow clouds in the white of his eyes – a byproduct of the liver toxicity from the not-too

If optimism and happiness are twin cherries on a single stalk, a runaway bride and wedding oath are opposite poles of a magnet.

There is a huge difference between saying yes "I do" and leaving a man at the altar. So much so that it is the theme of the sliding doors-style novel Written in the Stars by Ali Harris. The conundrum, as in most situations, shows how one decision leads us into completely different paths. It's true in relationships. It's true in