Family Outing in West Bank Ends in Hail of Israeli Gunfire..

These kids are a similar age to my kids. I am all too familiar with shinaligans and all. That is what makes reading this article by the NY Times so unsettling. It's too close to home. Saturday night, parents take the kids for an outing, to get donuts... and then the parents get shot? Is this why the war in the Middle East will never end? How do you heal?

Publish or Perish

 

This article in AusDoc resonates with me and clearly quite a few of my peers. I think it is important for a doctor, regardless whether they are a generalist or a specialist, to at least have done some sort of research once. Indeed, the research output for the majority of these would likely be an audit of some kind, with the intention of reviewing practice rather than adding to the "noise" in the sea of published research. This, indeed, shouldn't be a prerequisite to advanced training, which is becoming a written/unwritten rule for most specialities these days. This is a shame. 

Yet, this problem is not new. Do we really need a ATAR of 99.5 or above for medical school entrance? In Australia, we have somewhat sorted this out by making most medical school entrances postgraduate. But does this really solve the problem of trying to identify those who would otherwise be excellent physicians but just don't have the academic aptitude? 

And so it begins

 

Peter Hartcher from The Age has this uncanny ability to say it as it is.. "No one doubted America's ability to unleash hell. The question is how it handles what comes next". I am too young to remember Vietnam, let alone all the later wars in the Middle East. While one can take a simple view of who's right and who's wrong, it is in reality, like most things in life, rather complicated, isn't it? This is exemplified when my 10-year-old daughter asked me a simple, poignant question – why and what's happening?

It is often said that history is wrriten by the victors. No doubt that is true - who is to bat for the ones who's defeated? The summary on Kiddle is probably what I will use as a resource to talk to her about it.