My recent leisure reading on apology brought back my memory of a long-run Blondie comic strip, in which Mr. Dithers decides to apologize to Dagwood for calling him a "dimwitted noodle brain." Dithers then apologizes by saying, "Dagwood, I'm sorry you're a dimwitted noodle brain" and declares that his conscience is clear because of his "heartfelt apology." (And no prizes for guessing that Mr. Dithers uses the words "I'm sorry" in the sense to express compassion

It was another routine morning. I went back to office, and started the computer before doing anything else. After fumbling through the keyboard, I found an Internet connection problem, and thereafter my work ground to a halt.

I couldn't open the tax computation message from the Inland Revenue Department. Interim report form for my research project could not be completed. I had no way to send out the reference letter for my intern. It was impossible for me to read the new issue of the New England Journal of

After sharing an article about medical student burnout and misery in Facebook, quite a number of friends wrote to me.

Talk to any of the medical students, and it's hard not to notice that their bumpy path is littered with failures. I like listening to their collection of stories, told in their pain and occasionally joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and, more often, their cry.

I can sit and make sounds of empathy, but I am not able to come up with any good solution

Medical students or doctors must have been asked for about the gazillionth time why they choose to practice medicine, and if that’s because they want to save life.

This is one of those questions where my first impulse is to say "Of course!" and "Impossible!" at the same time (which is of course impossible).

While I wish I could have answered something inspirational, the truth is that whenever students ask me for such advice, I would quote, without hesitation, Voltaire who once said

The very first thing I learn from the conference at Philadelphia this year is that I, being a doctor with training and special interest in diseases of the kidney, knew very little about renal pathology (which literally means medical sleuthing by peering through a microscope at the kidney tissue samples).

I wish I had attended this fascinating renal pathology course long ago. And that brings me to my story of flying to a top-notch renal pathology course in New York seven years ago. For heaven's sake, I was

My sister went to a meeting at Vancouver. I am going to attend a nephrology conference at Philadelphia. My elder brother lives in Illinois. We ended up having a family get-together at my brother's home.

You don't have to be Hercule Poirot to see that the three of us would gossip about our parents. And you've probably heard the complaint that one's mum who doesn't really listen to her children because she thinks there's nothing they could say she doesn'

As a medical professional on the flight to Chicago this morning, I was called upon to see a gentleman who passed out twice after bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea.

It was not an exciting story. Instead, it reminds me the very first time when I, as a graduate medical student, was to help someone fallen sick aboard.

We were having the Outward Bound School sea diploma course then. The sea was rough, the majority of us miserable with throwing up. My teammates turned to me, who was supposed to

After finishing my round on a Saturday morning, I was about to leave the hospital. I then heard someone calling my name, and it turned out to be an old friend of mine.

There followed a five-minute conversation starting with "What do you do?" on the corridor. This familiar conversation opener, whether you like it or not, is everywhere around us.

The way we ask or answer this question simply reflects how we identify ourselves in terms of the work we do. In virtually every society

Suppose you're going for dinner and the waitress forgets to place your order, keeping you hungry at the restaurant for thirty minutes without a good reason. What would you do? Never shall I forget the last time when the waitress tried to hide the mistake and asked me to tell her my order again "so that she could trace the dishes for me." Seizing on her mistake and her "courageous move" to deny and hide it, I rose to my feet and taught her a good lesson.

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I have been enjoying a book teaching us to make fun of reading and how to enjoy writing. The author didn't say a lot about writing skills. Rather, it's the trick for staying in our writing chairs that really impresses me.

One of the most pleasant lessons was drawn from the perspective of Atul Gawande, an award-winning doctor-writer. The author quoted Gawande, "To be sure, talent helps… Nonetheless, attending surgeons say that what is most important to them is finding people