The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed country, but few people know this. Until 1996, maternal death rates were gradually declining. But in 1996 that decline ended and the rate started to spiral. Americans today are 50% more likely to die in the period surrounding childbirth than their own mothers…
I have spent a lot of time contemplating what has turned our culture from one in which topics could be discussed, acknowledgment could be made for parts of the opposing arguments which had merit, and indeed that people could blend notions from both sides and come up with something they could agree on, or at…
While I understand the reasoning behind evidence-based medicine (EBM), common sense tells us that no rules are going to correctly fit a situation 100 percent of the time. We are all different. More importantly, the reduction of medical decision-making to a set of research-based findings destroys the real value of medicine, the story space between…
The excitement over deep learning and neural networks is well deserved, but the notion that artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of “deep learning” will replace the need for physician expertise is, I would suggest, a bit premature. Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., in “A.I. Versus M.D.” does an excellent job of illustrating the differences between man…
I have always been interested in the interaction between writers and editors, probably because I have sat in each of these two chairs. As an editor in a department producing technical articles for the satellite communications industry, I often worked with engineers who found it difficult to put their ideas into words, especially if English…
