Like many internal medicine doctors, I often see eighty-something-year-old men and women coming to hospital with a diagnosis of frailty. The word frailty is more or less the same as fragile. Being fragile, a senior gets easily bulged with ailments, and then bursts.

As one of my fragile patients went downhill, one family member after another asked for escalation of treatment to save his life, understandably so. That patient had weak muscles, scanty comprehensible words and quite some bruises (after doctors' attempts

Philip Pullman once said, "All we need is the word ' Once ...' and we're off." He is referring to the appeal of classics such as "Snow White", "Cinderella" and many Grimm tales.

All right. Everyone take a seat. Now I'm going to tell a story, not from the Brother Grimm. That's my daughter's favorite recently, and it comes from an amusing author in Japan.

Once there was a family of sweet potatoes

In the middle of the summer holidays, a number of high school students came to my hospital. They sat on either side of the doctor in the clinic, going around with the doctor who saw patients everywhere in the hospital. This could have been the first time they stayed in a public hospital.

I haven't thought much about the high school education before the students joined us. We talked about everything, and then I realized that high-school days are pretty far away in my life. For a moment

How can you get the golden-brown colour and fabulous aroma by cooking food?

Temperature is the trick.

And by temperature I really do mean high temperature . Chemically it's something called caramelisation reaction, which occurs when we heat food in an oven, grill or oiled frying pan up to around 160 ^o C. That doesn't mean we get nothing below 160 ^o C. By the time the temperature rises to 140 ^o C, it will kick start another set of Maillard

Some time in the summer, at the end of an academic year when Obama was 17 years old, a party was thrown in Hawaii. The old picture of Obama and his date in that party was recently taken out of his schoolmate's shoe box, and shown to the readers of Time magazine.

The years have gone by in the blink of an eye, and oh, photographs are no longer developed. Gone is the day of putting old photographs in an album or shoe box. For about as long

When telephone hoax or telemarketing are everywhere, any incoming call without the caller's number displayed can be enough to push us over the edge. It's no different even if the caller is a doctor (who won't sell low credit card interest or mortgage plan).

That's a big problem when a hospital masks all the outgoing telephone call numbers. Hospitals aren't supposed to appear like a terrorist wearing mask, of course, unless that hospital turns out to behave like Osama bin Laden -

I was reading Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide when one of our medical students asked me for help. That student has to take another half year remedial class before graduation. Dare to call remedial school term a "final sentence," and you're likely to hear exasperated moans and groans from the students.

I couldn't help thinking of Lehrer's near-death experience as a pilot. On a rainy fall day, beneath clouds so grey that dawn bled into evening, he was at seven thousand

There's no medium like the books to give us the pleasure of growing up (ah, yes, and growing down) as parents. While Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions gives mothers the solace they seek, Ben George's The Book of Dads lends gravity. After I borrowed the book last week, I've been reading this wonderful collection of essays bit by bit, some of them good, many of them precious.

Recognising that we aren't alone won't make bad days disappear,

Eager to be doctors and learn how doctors work, six medical students stayed with me when I was on call this Thursday. In fact, once upon a time, I was just as excited to follow the doctors when I was at their age, maybe even more so.And slowly the idea or know-how of doctoring percolated into my mind.

Young minds tend to be the most sensitive. I wished I could give them a better sense of how to be a doctor. At the same time, I was

Over the course of many years of final year medical student examination, I've noticed that students' scores seem to be pretty consistent between examiners.

To explain how, allow me to run you through a typical examination. Each medical student goes through five examination stations, and is assessed by a pair of examiners in each station. Simply put, each student is examined by ten examiners. The basic idea behind meeting five pairs of examiners is using independent assessment as a bulwark against bias.

At the end of the (