After coming back from Austria, I have numerous nights without good sleep and need to begin each day with coffee. What, you might ask, is wrong with having coffee? The irony is that I had just returned from Austria, a country with great passion for coffee culture.

Most coffee aficionados know this. When ordering a cup of the brown stuff in Austria, a "coffee, please" doesn't suffice. You will find dozen of coffee variations in a decent Kaffeehaus (coffee house), where ordering

Try this. Ask a wife and a husband (or yourselves if you happen to be married) to estimate what percent of the time they each do the dishes, fold the laundry, walk the dog, make the bed, turn out the lights, and all the humdrum chores throughout the day. Can you guess what the answers would be? Their estimates will usually sum to more than 100 percent. This reminds myself how we human accept more responsibility for good deeds than for bad, and for successes than

An easy-to-read chart, intended for posting in physicians’ offices, has been recently described, comparing the odds of death in the coming 10 years for different ages and diseases. It was even suggested to have similar charts to be placed in the waiting room of every doctor’s office.

Risk, indeed, is a difficult concept, often mixed with emotion and mathematics. We humans tend to fear some diseases more than others. Some fears we exaggerate, others we underplay. Many women, for

Should doctors or medical students read more literature? No, I am not referring to medical literature published in the New England Journal of Medicine here, but literacy reading in the area of humanities.

This question comes to my mind partly because I am currently reading Ian McEwan ’s novel about a neurosurgeon who knows literally nothing outside the lens of his dissecting microscope within the operating theatre. His tale helps shed light on the mess of a doctor's life immersed in a universe of Latin and Greek names (running through the

I was struck by how often the book Saturday by Ian McEwan led to revelations. Pearls are found throughout the story of a day in the life of Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon and his minute-to-minute thoughts in reaction to those events.

One startling story is about the neurosurgeon's thought whilst flushing the loo, when he remembered a magazine lying around in the operating suite coffee room. At least one molecule of his own urine will at some time fall on him one day as rain, according to an

I am writing this blog after a week of seemingly overwhelming hassles.

My classmate had delivered her baby, went home and, alas, suffered from secondary postpartum haemorrhage (excessive bleeding after childbirth). I rushed to hospital, trying to get help for her, and ended up at home at five in the morning. I had less than two hours' sleep before going back to work. As I walked to the train station, the vendor machine swallowed my coins but did not deliver me a can of coffee that I

The Prime Minister despised the idea that someone teaches him how to spend the money in my last story. But could it really be wrong to exercise his freedom of choice? This reminds me of the argument on clinical freedom, long cherished by medical doctors as essential to effective practice. Can a doctor be as noble as the Prime Minister to claim (or reclaim) the freedom to make his/her own choice in terms of medical expenditure?

If you wish to (it is not really necessary), we can regard

The dreams that I made over the last few days have been overwhelmingly trembling. You didn't believe me? I didn't think you would.

Anyhow, I went to meet the Prime Minister and got a chance to speak to him, in my dream of course. We spoke about the seismology and pre-detection of earthquake. Needless to say, this is a controversial subject. "Isn't it better to keep track of warning sign than knowing nothing at all, Prime Minister?" I suggested

The awful earthquake rocked China and shocked everybody. It was unnerving for me to hear the news from Sichuan because I had just read the chapter of earthquake from Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything two weeks ago.

They may seem more than simply coincidence. There is a feeling, as creepy as that delivered by one of the most intense earthquakes (at Lisbon, Portugal) in recorded history, that my reading the quake chapter presages the disaster mystically. A sign of omen or prophecy? Do I deserve

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are alike in an intriguing way. Curiosity. An important gene to be possessed by a detective and clinician alike.

I do not dare to compare myself with more than a tiny fraction of Sherlock Holmes. In any case, I merely follow Sherlock Holmes’ way of keeping a notebook to make room for mysterious cases. A doctor's notebook may seem a far cry from that of a detective, but it is the very first building block in our search of knowledge. During all these