The First Comment From Satya Wardhana, MD (General Surgeon)

A penetrating question is frequently more intellectualy stimulating than a ponderous answer. A closed mind can be a formidable burden, and changing your mind proves that you've got one. Claude Bernard recognized the danger of unchallenged survival tradition when observed: "It is what we think we know already that prevents us from learning." We must continuosly assault what we think we know with questions. Alfred North Whitehead noted: "No man of science could subsribed without qualification to Galileo's beliefs or to Newton's beliefs, or to all his own scientific beliefs of ten years ago."
As surgeons, we learn both from personal experience and from the published series of outhers. Physical laws are predictable. When a physical drops a brick out the window, it always goes down. The patterns in medicine are not so clear. Patients, their diseases, and our therapies are all different. The Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz could have been describing medicine when he wrote about war: "A great part of the information obtained in war is contracditory, a still greater part is false and by far the greatest part is doubtful." Surgeons are almost unique in our ability to be self-questioning and self-critical. We must never march, like a bunch of lemmings, into a sea of intellectual acceptance.
This blogspot is again dedicated to the penetrating question. Armed with a dedication to inquiry, surgeons will happily evolve. Dinosaurus were inflexible and are extinct.
SURGEONS ARE NEITHER.