On International Peace Day, commit to nonviolence in your own life For years, I had driven by it, admiring the architecture, but I had never visited it until this summer. The building, one of the newest and most beautiful in Washington, D.C, is on Constitution Avenue...
This summer’s Disney-Pixar movie “Inside Out” makes us think about our thinking. But, I wonder, first of all, “can we even think about our thoughts?” In fact, over the summer with campers at Lausanne Collegiate School, from junior kindergarten to seventh grade, I was...
Sitting across the desk at the car dealership, Steven Ethridge, a soft-spoken salesman, was copying down the VIN number of our newly purchased van. “Last year, I couldn’t read the numbers,” he casually remarked. As a doctor, I was curious why a middle-age man would...
This week, when I read the headlines “Blue Cross proposes premium increases,” I cringed. Health care premiums are a significant burden on many American families, averaging about $1,000 a month, not counting thousands of dollars people pay in deductibles, copayments,...
Some years ago, when my father underwent bypass surgery, he was anxious, depressed and in pain as he lay in the hospital bed tied to IV catheters and tubes. Each day, his surgeon, his hospitalist, and other consultant doctors whisked in and out, asking how he was...
Last Tuesday evening after dinner, with a cup of tea in hand, I read a newspaper column titled, “Women still earn a lot less than men.” This prompted me to ask my wife, “Do you think this is really true?” Then, I editorialized, “But it can’t be true in health care.”...
