Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Uncategorized”
Birthday morning – I’m up before the house at 6:30 am, take my morning constitutional, and then it’s out the door by 7am to catch the tail end of the most recent winter swell. The water is frigid. There are only three surfers and a guy on a surfski spread far apart along the sandy shorebreak as several 3-4 foot …
Humans are curious creatures. We like to regard ourselves as being internally consistent while the reality is far messier. For evidence, look no further than our investments. Or as the artist formerly known as Dr. Moneyblogs is fond of quoting: Don’t tell me what you think. Tell me what you have in your portfolio. -Nassim Nicholas Taleb Many personal finance …
I show up for the morning “hot zone” shift and check in with the lead nurse in the ED. Of 60 potential clinical spaces (accounting for every gurney, chair, and our fast track area), 29 are occupied by boarders – patients admitted to the hospital who remain in the ED either because there are insufficient beds upstairs in the hospital …
Distance learning during COVID has meant coming to terms with the disappointment of public schooling that fell short. It was a perfect storm. Some teachers adapted skillfully, while others were quick to use the pandemic as a reason to pursue a watch-the-video-do-the-worksheet abdication of direct teaching responsibilities. Sitting in front of a screen all day is not rewarding (perhaps my …
It wasn’t deliberate. As a birdwatcher who’d been less than avid in recent months, I thought it time to double down on a pursuit that seemed made for a quarantine. I’ve always had a shameful secret among birders. I suspect I am the lone birdwatcher who has visited Costa Rica without spotting a resplendant quetzal, a dubious distinction that I …
It’s that time of year. From our deck, we watch as a wall of fog rolls in from the Pacific Ocean, enveloping every structure in it’s path and reducing visibility to the point where it’s a struggle to render the features of houses across the street. This is a J.R.R. Tolkien, Sauron’s massing armies type of fog. Cycling through it …
[Disclosure: If you register for WCI CON 21 using this link, I make a modest commission at no cost to you.] Enrollment has begun for the upcoming Physician Wellness and Financial Literacy Conference 2021, offered every 1-2 years by the White Coat Investor. I was a speaker at the 2020 convention, which took place in March and coincided with the …
I am lying in a pool of sunlight with a newly arrived New Yorker, reading an article about virtual assistants and luxuriating in the warmth and the light of LA. There’s a quality to the light that attracted and kept John Baldessari living and working in Los Angeles, and while the quote from him I’m thinking of escapes me the …
Back in training, my fellow residents and I gulped ladles full of Kool-Aid from tenured professors who ruled an impressively pedigreed land of job security and underlings to perform scut. For readers outside of medicine, scut refers to the small and annoying tasks involved in routine patient care. Examples might include drawing blood at specific time to test levels of …
I’ll keep this short and sweet. One of my medical heroes, Dr. Rick Hodes, was interviewed on the White Coat Investor podcast. Rick is a Jewish medical director working with Catholic nuns at the Mother Theresa Mission in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, caring for sick destitute patients including Ethiopian Orthodox Christians and Muslims. Together they model the world as it should …