Today we discussed informed consent which was very interesting. A colleague brought up a very important point, was that enough? Is it enough to just give a patient an informed consent with all the risks and options available? Everyone has a skewed view, whether they try to or not. Thus, when you give an informed consent, it may lean one way, whether you are conscious of it or not. Thus, if there is a surgeon who gives an informed consent, but pushes for his agenda and hides the fact that he has never doing the procedure by himself before, will that informed consent actually make the outcome and different? Perhaps it will, and perhaps it won’t. I think informed consent isn’t enough. Patients need a real conversation with not only the primary surgeon/physician, but also a second opinion, whether they think they need it or not. This allows a… Continue reading →

As one of our lessons, we were asked to try to make some Domino Art with one instructor, one artist, and one observer. Three tries were allowed (with different masterpieces) but each time, the communication got better and better. It was amazing to see not only how important communication was, but also how important experience was. For example, in the beginning, we were reading out the colors of each tile and didn’t understand that the structures were essentially 2-D. We created some pretty interesting structures, but that wasn’t so much miscommunication as much as it was inexperience. It simulated what it would be like to be working with either a new coworker or at a new place for the first time. You don’t know where anything is and you don’t quite understand how things work. It was interesting that after the first encounter, we got closer and closer and it… Continue reading →