"...I just want to say that I believe there are options out there! A take a number option, like they have in a deli."*

From The Wall Street Journal | Health

The Henry Ford of Heart Surgery
In India, a Factory Model for Hospitals Is Cutting Costs and Yielding Profits

One of the best quotes?

"What health care needs is process innovation, not product innovation."
- Dr. Devi Shetty

Also, Holy Taco (in East Atlanta) is my new favorite restaurant option for Mexican food. Much better than standing in a deli line for a chicken quesadilla...

*Quote from the latest episode of The Office. Don't know how many options there will be for health insurance if the vote for the recent bill doesn't go through, though...

The Common "Wealth" of Massachusetts: Health Reform

Massachusetts was the first state to provide "affordable, quality, accountable health care" to all its citizens (1). Provided that a similar bill (one that hopefully does a better job at cost-control) eventually passes at the national-level, there's an infinitesimal chance that a majority of Americans will actually be satisfied with their health care options.

The American economist Tsung-Mei Cheng formulated three "Universal Laws of Health Care Systems" (2):
1) No matter how good the health care in a particular country, people will complain about it.
2) No matter how much money is spent on health care, the doctors and hospitals will argue that it is not enough.
3) The last reform always failed.

Laws 1 and 2 are unfortunate pillars of reality: the patient complaints may never cease and the funds allocated towards health care may never meet the standards of medical practitioners and management. But, for the common wealth and health of the nation, here's to doing more and doing better - after reform passes - so that Law 3 no longer holds true (3).

"Get your scrubs ready... It's about to go down!"

Facts in news articles & books speak louder than facts on blogs:
1. NPR: Massachusetts Makes Health Insurance Mandatory
2. T.R. Reid: The Healing of America
3. Paul Krugman: "After Reform Passes." NY Times.

An island made of mud (and med students).

Better late than never: An Update from Fall Break

Memphis (a.k.a., my escape from the monotony that ATL has morphed into as of late) - was exactly what I needed: a chance to get away, relax, and recuperate with good food and an even better friend. Not to mention, I was unusually productive during the four days that I spent there.

UT Memphis Medical School

Aside from spending quality time on Mud Island with my friend on the week of her birthday, a few other highlights from my fall beak trip include visiting the UT Health Sciences Center and Medical School (and sitting in on a 2-hour anatomy GI lecture!), meeting some genuinely engaging UT med students, having an amazing meal at Papa Pia's downtown, and dining out at Pei Wei for my first time.

The "Cinderella" carriage

True, I didn't partake in the usual "tourist" activities, aside from my drive-by tour of St. Jude Children's Hospital, my brief encounters with the Memphis trolley line, and a couple glimpses of the Cinderella-like horse-drawn carriages downtown. But I'd trade the comfortable company of an old college friend for all that Memphis jazz any day.

(Techincally, Memphis is the birthplace of rock 'n roll and the "home of the Blues", but I was just using a euphemism to prove a slightly belabored point.)

Oh, and something cool to amaze your friends with your current political and pop knowledge: If you haven't heard, Kalpen Modi (a.k.a. the "Kal Penn" of Harold & Kumar, The Namesake, and the TV Show "House") recently started working at the White House as an associate director in the Office of Public Engagement, formerly known as the Office of Liaison.
And Penn Masala even performed at President Obama's Diwali celebration this week! If you've never heard them sing live or listened to a recording of them, prepare to be blown away by their unique synthesis of Eastern and Western musical elements.

It's simple, really.

With grad school classes currently in full-swing and work starting soon, I haven't had many free moments to really "live" in my apartment - to cook a "real" meal (one that doesn't just entail microwaving or heating a package) or to properly entertain friends (unless it involves just sitting around on a random assortment of furniture & talking until the boredom becomes too much).

But now, I finally have cookware and grown-up, dishwasher-safe dishes (as opposed to the flimsy, brightly-colored dorm dishes I used to eat on) and more reasons to shed the college-student habits of my former life. And that's where my fascination with RealSimple.com comes in. (Admittedly, I bummed these cooking supplies and dishes from my older brother's house - with his permission, of course - but that's besides the point.)

My favorite source for handfuls of deliciousness & life finesse.

Some of my top picks from the site:

• 24 Great Snacks
• 28 Uses for Everyday Items
• What's the Worst that Could Happen?
  

And the best part is, you don't need to have boatloads of free time or the culinary skill of Martha Stewart to successfully implement most of the showcased ideas.

On a somewhat-related but completely personal note, I recently discovered that I am (and probably have been, for some time) allergic to peanuts, which is disappointing on a number of levels. I've known the fact that allergies can develop later in adulthood for years, especially since I developed a tree nut allergy in college. But, in part due to my false sense of invincibility and mostly due to my unfaltering love for eating anything and everything with peanut butter, I always hoped, that when it came to peanuts, I would be an outlier (<-- read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell if you ever get a chance - it's filled with inspirational take-home points about success and society, but it's written in a refreshingly non-traditional way).

It's so much harder to let go of things when you know exactly what you're missing out on. The same goes from people. Tonight, I'll make sure to take 5 for everyone and everything that I miss about them.*

*The links in the last sentence will probably only make sense to a select few readers.

10 years or so.*

Tonight, I was scheduled for a desk shift from 10 pm to midnight - basically, sitting in an office and answering the phone, if it happens to ring. So far, not much has happened, outside of one or two pizza deliveries and a lot of small talk about logging onto the internet, delayed flights, and dinner plans. But, every now and then, my soundscape has consisted of snippets of discussions that seem like windows to my future, if I were to become a clinician, that is. It's odd how your professional aspirations can catch up to you in the places you least expect.







I did a little research, and, apparently, the group of physicians in the lobby have come here from around the country for an event on "Therapeutic Targets in CMD". For the less clinically-inclined, CMD stands for Congenital Muscular Dystrophies - they're basically a group of muscle disorders that strike early in development and cause generalized muscle weakness, among other symptoms. You might have heard the phrase on television before, since Jerry Lewis is the national spokesperson for the organization that raises money for CMD. The underlying cause of disease is a genetic mutation, so rest assured that you probably don't have a CMD if you weren't diagnosed with it at birth.

Emory Commencement photo from Emory Alumni Association albums

Summer's a little more than half-over, and most of my friends, all recent college graduates, are poised to start their first year of medical school or graduate school in different cities around the United States. A few others are about to dive into the intimidating field of entry-level business internships or philanthropic teaching positions like Teach for America, both of which pay modest salaries but offer the possibility of life-changing professional experiences.

I wonder where everyone will end up in a decade or so - it would be ironic if I ended up at a conference like Cure CMD, especially since pediatric rehabilitation is the specialty that I've always been interested in pursuing.

*10 years is an alternative rock band from Tennessee that released a digital bundle of their music about a month ago. I haven't had a chance to hear all their songs, but a few of them, especially their singles "Beautiful" and "Wasteland", are pretty good.

Better later than never?

Over the past month or so, I've been reading V.S. Ramachandran's Phantoms In The Brain (along with about a dozen or so other books for my English and music classes), writing too many papers, tutoring more students than I can keep track of at the Writing Center, and stuffing in as much socializing as my stressful senior-year-second-semester schedule permits - it's still hard to believe that graduation is right around the corner.

What little free time I've had in between has been spent learning about blue people (in my course on ethics and the human genome) and preparing for Emory's 5th Annual Barenaked Voices A Cappella concert and Relay for Life this upcoming Friday night - two amazing events for two very different, but incredibly worthy causes. If you're interested, you can make a donation to the American Cancer Society (ACS) and help my team reach their goal at this site: Woodruff Against Cancer.

In other news, I'm getting my first-ever laptop this weekend. I'll be transitioning from my current desktop to a new MacBook by the end of the semester. It's made with arsenic-free glass, no brominated flame retardents, no mercury, and no PVC - I guess if I ever have to toss it out, at least my actions won't be environmentally-unfriendly (MacInTouch Review).

Oh, and awhile back, I cut off about 14 inches of my hair and donated it to Locks of Love. The morning I went to the salon, the weather changed from rain to sleet to snow as I sat in the salon chair. Crazy weather in the month of March, even according to Atlanta's standards.

I also officially (and definitively) decided that I'll be attending Rollins School of Public Health at Emory next fall, which means I'll be staying near Atlanta. Congrats to all the other Emory students who'll be staying here after graduation - whether it's for med school, grad school, work, or anything in between - and congrats to everyone else who's finalized plans elsewhere, too. Maybe we won't all be in the same place, but hopefully we'll see each other again down the road*. Better later than never, right?


*Last photo (of snow near Emory) taken by my friend, A. Rawat.

Three months of winter & wealth.

Fortune is a funny thing. The last fortune I received came on New Year's Eve, from a Chinese fortune cookie: "All the preparation you've done will finally be paying off!"

It's been about 3 months since then, give or take a few days; and each month, without fail, my fortune cookie fortune has come true.

Around the middle of January, I received the phone call that announced my acceptance to graduate school for next year; near the end of this month, I found out I was accepted to the study abroad program in Paris, France for the upcoming summer. Although, I'm not sure if an occurrence of equally fortuitous nature will present itself sometime in March.

So, I guess my fortune cookie fortune was right, but was it really fortune if I created all the outcomes myself? Everything that happened was a result of "all the preparation [I'd] done" and the hard work I've put in over the past few years. It seems as though we actually have the ability to alter our destinies - but, why, then, can't we always get things to turn out the way we want them to?

Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French journalist and previous editor-in-chief of French Elle, once wrote that it seemed as though his "whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner." Sometimes, the hand we're dealt is just that - near misses, but also serendipitously-seized opportunities.

The life of Bauby was, however, anything but completely fortuitous. After suffering a massive stroke at the age of 43, Bauby was "paralyzed from head to toe... his mind intact... imprisoned in his own body, unable to speak or move" (Bauby 4). Only by blinking his left eyelid could he communicate with others; this is how he dictated his entire memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Interestingly enough, Bauby's memoir was originally dictated and written in French, so it has cultural and linguistic significance for me, especially now that I'll be going to Paris this upcoming summer. The book has since been translated into a number of other languages - most notably into English, by Jeremy Leggatt - and its French film adaption was nominated for 4 Oscars in 2007. Bauby's writing not only allows readers to gain insight into the inner-workings of a patient with "Locked-In Syndrome", but also offers a significant amount of background on the French healthcare system and the layout of Paris. Perfect literary material to prepare me for my neuroscience classes, my Parisian trip, and whatever else fortune might have in store for me.


*Quotes from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominque Bauby; image is original artwork by yours truly.

High, lighting too much.

I've taken so many practice exams in the past couple of days that my brain is now in default MCAT mode whenever I do anything. While reading an article in the NY Times tonight, I tried to use my mouse to "highlight" a specific sentence on the screen - until I realized I had just attempted to use a highlighting feature that exists only for passages on computer-based exams like the MCAT.

This begets the question, even outside the context of such a test, how much is too much? And what is it that makes us over-extend ourselves to begin with?

When a particularly tragic or difficult event happens in a person's life, one of the positive results (after going through the stages of denial and pain and depression and so forth - the "grief cycle", as Kubler-Ross calls it in her book, On Death and Dying) is gaining the drive to do more and to do better. Although it's ironic that the rationalization of something horrible ultimately leads to the motivation for something beneficial, at least initially negative situations do eventually propel us in a positive direction. And that's probably what matters most in the end.

Making an effort, trying to improve - both are inherent markers of a logical, conscientious person. But, even the most practical individuals can become tunnel-visioned and so overly focused on a single task that everything else exists only in relation to that one cruciality.

The key, experts say, is to reach an optimal level of understanding and comfort, and then, to stop. Achieving this kind of balance is usually much easier said than done; and, coincidentally, it's precisely the fear of failure that causes us to completely over-exert ourselves, resulting in the very defeat we so desperately wanted to circumvent.

Pressure, reputation, expectations. Everyone has reasons for wanting more in life. While it's okay to not want to settle for anything less than the best, each person should be his or her own measure of perfection. Otherwise, we start trying too hard to do too much, for all the wrong reasons.

We have the ability to recover from unforeseeable adversity and bounce back with unimaginable resilience, but we falter the moment we assume our success is inextricably dependent on the often misguided judgments of others. Perhaps it's time to recognize that true limits only exist if and when we create them for ourselves.