Every time a doctor breaks bad news to the patient's family members, they go to pieces. From breast cancer to heart attack to motor vehicle crash, and each time, one can feel the family member’s heart almost palpably turning to flutter.

Faced with this common scene in hospital, what should a doctor do? Instead of telling them to let go and accept the diagnosis, I feel a need to give the family members something to do. It's not that they aren't in bad

After reading the social scientist Dan Ariely's book, I've learned that I'm no better than Pavlov's dog. Ditto for Dan Ariely.

Dan experienced a devastating chemical burns accident and got a liver virus from an infected blood transfusion after three weeks in the hospital. For that, he had gone through an eighteen-month ordeal of interferon injection to kick the virus. While interferon treatment has clear health benefits and survival advantages, the medication came to effect at a big price - each shot is

Have you heard of the HK$100 million Mark Six dream? Of course you have. Everyone has.

I'll confess it; I'm kind of tired of lottery winner frenzy. Maybe it has something to do with the earliest adaptation level theory study on overall life happiness among lottery winners.

This might not be news to you, but in case it is you should hear the experiment in which psychologists compared a sample of major lottery winners with normal controls, and also with paraplegic accident victims.

My wife's sling bag always reminds me of the vulnerability of adults, and how easily we can be lured into the shortsightedness.

The bag looked fine until I made a careless splash of ink on it (when I hand-painted a T-shirt). So, what can be done to the blemished bag? The answer: not much - at least not immediately. A small voice inside me said, “Let's forget about the ink.” But the wounded part was less comfortable. It

Not long ago, I read the blog post of my mentor who had to say goodbye to his barber. I found a great example of loyal customer who visited the same barber for over thirty years. Then came the moment for me to have haircut for my Jasmine. This turned out to be a haphazard zigzag style.

Which brings me to the memory of my barber.

The experience of being a child to visit the barber for the first time has a common affliction with visiting the dentist: fear of the knife and

I always recommend mentorship to young medical student or doctor who wants to learn medicine.

That is what I'd been doing over the last few weeks when the summer students joined me. Did they learn from me - as a nephrologist - how dialysis works? Not really. For that bit, the students can figure out themselves from the textbooks. It's a good start, of course, to teach them that haemodialysis works under the principle of diffusion.

And that is exactly how mentorship works its magic: by

We adults often have memories of the children books from when we were children ourselves. While it may not be too soon for us to give up reading the Harry Potter series, they're just not as good as those books that were read during our childhood.

On the positive side, we are still drawn to books that have a nostalgic theme. The negative side, of course, may be that we're far behind the latest trend of children's storybooks. I simply worry if I am still as

One day after my confirming flight tickets and accommodation of our first venture with Jasmine to Japan, the country was smashed by nature's temper tantrum on 11 March.

We didn't cancel the holiday; we changed the destination. Our heads are round, as Francis Picabia reminds us, so that our thinking can change directions.

This is the first time we cleaned the cobwebs out of our suitcase since the arrival of Jasmine. Venturing out with Jasmine isn't the same as our erstwhile hiking trip at New

If you think adjectives help to decorate a sentence, don't.

Most adjectives are unnecessary, as I learn from Roy Peter Clark and William Zinsser. Thanks to their teaching, I have pruned out the unnecessary words like passionate or enthusiastic or responsible to describe my interns when they ask me to write a referee letter.

Don't just tell people that Jonathan, for instance, is passionate. Show them. And, with that in mind, I wrote, "As every intern attests, it takes good patience

When was the last time you studied the Periodic Table after the secondary school chemistry lesson? Or, frankly, any at all?

Hardly, if not because of the recent chaos about iodine and plutonium.

Once hailed as the "Law of Octaves," the elements were arranged by their atomic weight to repeat their patterns at every eighth place along a scale, like the octaves on a piano keyboard. The idea turned out to be widely mocked, and withered. It was not until 1869 when Dimitri Ivanovich