Feel the Music
• I was amazed to learn about Evelyn Glennie, a percussionist who performs solo all over the world with different orchestras and musicians. She also teaches and gives motivational speeches. In the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games (London), she led a thousand drummers. She won numerous awards for music from 1982 to 2023, and owns more than 3500 percussion instruments from all over the world. Oh, did I mention that she has been profoundly deaf since age 12? From Wikipedia:
“This does not inhibit her ability to perform. She regularly plays barefoot during live performances and studio recordings to feel the music. Glennie contends that deafness is largely misunderstood by the public. She explains that her teacher Ron Frobes taught her to hear with parts of her body other than her ears. Ron Frobes helped her in feeling the music other way from her body parts. She felt the upper drum from the Waist up and the lower drum from waist down. On her website Glennie published “Hearing Essay” in which she discusses her condition. Glennie also discusses how she feels music in different parts of her body in her TED talk “How To Truly Listen”, published in 2003, and a collection of her speeches and writings are published in her book Listen World!.”
New Years
• Regarding New Year’s Resolutions, don’t forget that you can subtract instead of adding. Who has time for more things to do? But if you subtract practices you don’t need, you free up time for new healthy behaviors or to just rest.
• I love this paragraph from The Range Widely newsletter: “Like the road-sign backfire, the officer’s invocation of the Christmas tree effect reminded me of the work of University of Virginia professor Leidy Klotz. Klotz’s research spans engineering, design, and human behavior, and hammers home an intriguing finding: humans are hardwired to add stuff to solve problems, and we often overlook better solutions that involve taking stuff away.”
“Cholesterol”
We do comprehensive lipid and cardiovascular screening on patients, ensuring we always check a couple of tests that don’t get as much attention.
• We check lp(a) (see this NYTimes article and this paper in PubMed).
• We check apoB (see this paper, with the quote: “In 2019, the European Society of Cardiology/European Atherosclerosis Society stated that apolipoprotein B (apoB) was a more accurate marker of cardiovascular risk than low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) and non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol.”
Outright
• Found a new protein bar called Outright. Very sweet flavor, a bit high in carbs (~20 grams net), good for post-workout snack. The only superb flavor seems to be the cookies and cream.
Change
• Greater Louisville Medical Society asked me to put together an essay for Louisville Medicine reflecting on a 2010 article I wrote about switching from Ophthalmology to Emergency Medicine. Go to page 15-17 in the document from the link. Here are a couple sentences from it.
Another constant since 2010 is a gravitational pull back to writing. I love the engaging flow experience, but writing is often the most challenging and humbling part of the job (especially when that manuscript comes back from reviewers). Perhaps most striking about the 2010 essay is how clearly a different person wrote it. Heraclitus wrote that “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” It is fascinating to review not just what our past selves thought, but how they thought. Looking back for narrative anchors in these rapidly passing 13 years, I see squandered opportunities for reflection…
ER docs notoriously lack patient continuity, but we do have continuity with residents, nurses, coworkers, and other physicians. GLMS remains a glue for the broad network of doctors in town. I am still excited for each new issue of Louisville Medicine, to see what our colleagues are going through. We write about the great fortune of finding true vocations that focus on healing people instead of managing stocks, bonds, cars, or politics. But we also write about our constantly changing selves. We share the stories that shape us and the important people in our lives, people that medicine tries to pull us way from if we aren’t careful.
Reading
• Cool short article from Rob Henderson on how he finds time to read. Books are a necessity to Henderson, a guy who came out of the foster care system to join the Air Force and attend Ivy League schools. His autobiography is coming out soon.
Quotes
“Be careful what you wish for, not because you’ll get it but because you’ll be turned into the thing that can get it…it’s a process that breaks you down and rebuilds you into the right tool for the job.”
– Jed McKenna
When you were young, you needed something you did not receive. And you will never receive it. The proper attitude is mourning. Not blame.
– attributed to Alice Miller by Robert Bly, but I can’t find this exact quote anywhere
