January is named for the two-faced Roman god, Janus. His distinguishing feature was simultaneously looking back in reflection and forward in anticipation (imagery which pre-dated the Julian calendar by over a century)–a good choice for the first month of the new year . New Year’s Resolutions have existed in various forms from the time of the Ancient Babylonians (c. 2000 BCE), who would commit to returning borrowed tools in the new year,  through the middle ages, when knights would renew their...

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have taken the world by storm over the past 2 years. I imagine almost everyone reading this newsletter has at least experimented with one LLM; probably many more of you have incorporated LLMs as efficiency tools broadly into your lives.  Digital dementia was coined by German psychiatrist Manfred Spitzer in 2012 as a phenomenon whereby the brain loses capacities when that brain’s owner relies excessively on technology.  We’ve all...

Like most holidays, I'll be working this Thanksgiving. I don't have kids, so years ago I started volunteering for these shifts. It seemed like the right thing to do—give my colleagues with young children a chance to be home making memories with their family. It's become something of a tradition for me now, whether I'm in the ED, urgent care, or seeing palliative care patients. But here's something I've noticed over the years, something that's both heartening and revealing: patients act...