jjablkowski's blog

Dr William Osler was speaking to medical students at the University of Toronto in 1903 when he said, “[t]he practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head.”[1] In 2023, Daniel Marchalik raises the question, “How do we preserve the parts of medicine that inspire people to become physicians in the first place?” in a book review published in the Lancet.[2] The hero of the book, Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s 2019 novel Fleishman is in Trouble, is Dr Fle

Imagine you are talking with a friend, casually running your fingers through your long, thick hair, when you suddenly feel a bald spot. Once you get home, you take a mirror to your head and see a perfectly round, smooth patch about the size of a quarter. Your stomach drops as you search for the possibility that maybe you were too rough with your hair. At first you wait, but then nervously decide to book an appointment with your family doctor. They tell you about alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss.

A new wave of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has prompted questions about how it may change clinical practice and health care delivery in the future. In particular, with news that ChatGPT, an AI large language model developed by OpenAI, passed the first two steps of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) as well as the American Heart Association Basic Life Support and Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support exams, what is the role of AI in the health care context and will it overtake the role of physicians?[1,2]

The Harvard Study of Adult Development began in 1938 and is still going strong today. The study set out to understand human health by investigating not what made people sick, but what made them thrive. Starting with 724 participants, it has expanded to now include three generations and more than 1300 descendants. 

Dr Linda Hawker’s recent blog post: “Changes in family medicine—baby boomers look back” gives an insightful and quasi-tearful overview of 45 years’ worth of changes that have emerged in medicine since she graduated from the University of Alberta Medical School in 1977.