I was asked to speak in a hospital forum about nonpunitive response to medical incidents. An apt illustration of the current climate comes from those stories in which honest doctors who make full confession find themselves viewed unfavourably. Should we then keep our mouths shut?

Hardly. There comes a time in the career of most doctors when things go badly awry. It comes earlier for those who work the hardest. No matter when it comes, however, the struggle is best overcome with support from the others. That's why I

"Will you still go to our departmental Xmas party?" It was the shaky voice of my colleague after attending the funeral service of my respectable patient last night.

I said yes. It wasn't that I did not shiver after temperature plunged from 20 degrees Celsius to five degrees. I did. No, the uneasy feeling of transit from a memorial service to a social event with party theme is difficult to shake off. And, I didn't miss the party that much. Going to say goodbye

A recent British Medical Journal commentary argued about the fairest peer review system in biomedical publication.

Peer review system has been a time-honoured process of evaluating scientific manuscripts; qualified individuals within a relevant field are often invited to critique and comment upon a submitted manuscript (without monetary reward or academic recognition, in case you're interested to know) before the editors make a final decision to publish it or not.

Is it fair? Not even close. No, it's not fair; but it is a fact

On the same afternoon in 2009, I was reading What to Expect the First Year , eager to set the stage for Jasmine's arrival. One year later, I brought Jasmine to her first preschool playing class today, carrying with me the special TimeFrames issue. That's an issue devoted to looking back at the stories of the past decade (and what it might presage about the future).

After taking a quick look at the Time magazine's content, I began to realize that quite

The psychology professor Robert Cialdini keeps saying that reciprocity is the most powerful of all the forces that influence behaviour - give what you want to receive. The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany just reported a study that makes this very point.

After observing 3-year-olds' behaviour in a between-subjects design, researchers concluded that children are much less likely to help a person who has been seen to harm someone else – in this case adult actors tearing up or breaking another adult's drawing or clay

A glance at my dialysis patient's blood count reminds me the Recession – everything went down except the level of anxiety. It's the third month like this. I told my patient, "Well, we don't really know what's happening. Your white cell and platelet counts are both coming down, almost as quickly as you're going anaemic." I suggested him to have a bone marrow test to figure out the problem.

Of course, my patient didn't believe me.

When I walked into my office of the new hospital building, I saw an uncluttered desk. The only thing I wish to do to my room is to keep it tidy. I make the wish like we make New Year's resolution.

To celebrate the new office, I bought a gift for myself last night. It's the seventh edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary . The last dictionary I bought has been with me for over twenty years, like a loyal golden retriever with

The stories of au pair taking care of kids have formed a genre of their own in Hong Kong.

Too often, the working parents – me included – are hiring domestic maids to look after children at a very young age. As is often the case, the children spend more time with the maid than the parents, whether we admit it or not. While much has been written about the proper way to wean a child from the breast or bottles, neither Dr. Spock nor the parenting guidebook What to Expect the

In the Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird , the middle-aged lawyer Atticus Finch taught his daughter a simple trick to get along better with all kinds of folks.

"You never understand a person until you consider things from his point of view," he inspired, "or, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

But the real problem is that we have to make sure we've completely shaken off our feelings and dogma before we can really climb into someone's

My favorite essay from the recent Annals of Internal Medicine is "Attending Round," named after the doctors' job description.

The narrated events took place one morning in 1963, when the doctors seized the moment of looking after their patients themselves, with little assistance from others, drawing blood, preparing the slides of the urine sediment, the peripheral blood smear, and the sputum Gram stain. After conducting rounds with the nurse, the doctors rushed to look at the bone marrow biopsy. It was followed by