Pottery
No trip to Otaru is complete without a stroll through the glassware studios and stores, This is probably the third, and maybe the fourth, times our family have visited Otaru. We booked a wheel pottery workshop, instead of glass blowing craft class.
The joy of ceramics, as mentioned by Florence St. George in her postnatal depression story The Potter's Way , is getting more down to earth with clay. The whoosh of feel-good connection with the motion of rolling is calming and soothing. We learn to
Break
Every morning, I carve out a niche for myself to work at my office desk, when I am at a state of productivity Zen.
This Wednesday, I switched on the computer as usual and planned to invite authors to draft guidelines on dialysis. Except it wasn't as straightforward as that – nothing ever is – because my laptop was not working. Little did I know then that I would come to a standstill like my computer screen.
My eyes darted up and down the dark screen and said "open sesame
Plant
Magic Number
After the internet, and more specifically the World Wide Web, has changed our knowledge, artificial intelligence is going to transform everything. It's not a stretch to say that artificial intelligence is a game-changer. And it seems inevitable that doctors are being affected, if not under threat.
A randomised clinical trial, published in JAMA Network Open , found that the use of a large language model did not significantly enhance doctors' diagnostic reasoning beyond that of conventional point-of-care decision support resources such as UpToDate
Gravel
Forget, for a moment, we don't have enough hours in the day.
I was recently taught this trap we all get snared in. At first glance, it feels undeniably true because we have more things on our task list than time to do them. But it's no longer the case if we can offload any nagging tasks that have the lowest-yielding bids for our time.
David Allen calls it "brain dump", a tool to banish those energy-sucking tasks from our brain with
Trail Run
Universe
Inheritance
If you're looking for a contemporary vision of medication abuse, go to read the novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.
Central to the idea of "relaxation" is a young New York woman's numbing herself to near-coma with a remarkably huge repository of dangerous drugs. Risperidal, Ambien, Valium, Ativan, chewable melatonin, trazodone, Nembutal, Benadryl, NyQuil, Xanax, Lunesta, and her list goes on and on.
The tragedy of this miserable woman goes all the way
Fix
Nearly 30 years ago, I had no idea about patient safety as a junior medical intern, much less keep my patients safe.
The vivid real-life stories from Amy Edmondson's Right Kind of Wrong reminded me of the internship experience. She mentioned the near-fatal mistake of complex failure in a ten-year-old boy, whose face turned blue after surgery. The boy was given a morphine overdose – several times more than was appropriate.
Alas, that story was exactly what I had encountered in
Legend
In his 2018 book Through My Father's Eyes , the son of Billy Graham recounts his personal relationship with his father, an iconic American evangelist.
In 2007, the Billy Graham Library (ahead of his death at the age of 99) was dedicated in the presence of former American president Jimmy Carter (who recently died at the age of 100).
Carter also followed Jesus and taught Sunday school classes before, during, and after his time in the White House.