Dr. Chan and Mrs. Geng (not their real names) eased out of their chairs in the waiting room using their matching wooden canes, the kind distributed by...

Very overweight patients have a rough time in medicine, as they do in society at large. Despite the heightened PC environment of medicine, doctors have a hard time suppressing unconscious bias.

There is a veritable epidemic of doctor-writers out there. What is going on? Are doctors suddenly in the kiss-and-tell mode? What about confidentiality? Professionalism? HIPAA?

Locking the entrance to the emergency room: there could not have been a more potent image to the final day of St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City.

Medicine is far too complex to apply simple formulas. What really helps doctors-in-training practice good medicine, decrease errors, and maintain a high standard of professionalism is good supervision.

Counting calories as part of health care reform--who knew? But apparently it's there on page 455. There will now be a national effort at posting calorie counts in chain restaurants.

A good chunk of those beautifully printed, fully legible prescriptions never make it to the drug store to be converted into actual pills.

With the shift toward the left among physicians, perhaps there will be a stronger momentum toward a single-payer-plan.

Getting the young adults in our society -- the next generation who will be contributing to our country -- to have adequate health insurance? Doesn't sound so nefarious to me.

I do spend time doing the things I learned in medical school like diagnosing disease and writing prescriptions, but that turns out to be only a part of the job, often a very small part.