Arthur Williams is a general surgeon.

A surgeon’s battle with ketamine-induced hallucinations

Conditions
September 21, 2024

An excerpt from Krooked Ketamine.

OK, here’s the thing: I had a little problem that needed correcting if I wanted to continue to work as a government surgeon. I had a janky heart, and it had a tendency to fire off at the absolute worst possible moments. I needed a pacemaker to help with the recalcitrant muscular metronome, but I absolutely hated the thought of lying down and feeling, at …

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A surgeon’s battle with ketamine-induced hallucinations

The hidden costs of teaching surgery: an academic surgeon’s perspective

Physician
February 3, 2023

I ran across one of those bordering-on-sappy Facebook posts that always pull me in, asking people to describe their job poorly and make it comically accurate. The photographer admitted she would flash clients, shoot someone, and then frame someone else. The bartender alluded to being a psychiatrist, marriage counselor, babysitter, and thirst quencher. You get the picture.

I am sure that each specialty in medicine has its own pithy, confuscating …

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The hidden costs of teaching surgery: an academic surgeon’s perspective

Ode to a little bile bag

Conditions
October 10, 2021

Surgery to remove the gallbladder is a relatively late intervention.  The first laparotomy was performed in 1807 in Danville, Kentucky, and surgeons like Billroth and Kocher, were removing thyroids and even parts of the esophagus as early as the 1870s; the pricklish gallbladder was not completely excised until 1882. For years previously, the medical and surgical dogma was that the gallbladder was an essential organ and couldn’t safely be …

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Ode to a little bile bag

An operative field of dreams

Physician
March 16, 2021

I am in a select crowd.

I have been fortunate enough to help some special people in their time of pain and heartache and bewilderment, facing operation or cancer or other ailments. I was fortunate to even get into medical school when I did; my grades weren’t too good, and no doubt in my mind were I to apply today, I wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance of getting into …

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An operative field of dreams

A call schedule to fix the Supreme Court

Policy
December 24, 2020

Though pushed to the back-burner by the never-ending orange election drama, the Supreme Court, with its significant conservative majority earned against the run of play, (to borrow a metaphor from sport) is one decision away from potential political irrelevance. Is there a way forward for the Supreme Court? Conservative hypocrisy and liberal outrage at the recent Republican machinations to pack the court with conservative jurists out of step with …

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A call schedule to fix the Supreme Court

The similarities between surgeons and bomber pilots

Physician
June 24, 2020

Recently surfing the far reaches of Netflix for a program on World War II that I hadn’t yet seen, I found a low budget serial documentary dealing with air power in war and in peace. The producers profiled individuals who had contributed to the eventualities of the airplane as a weapon of war or, conversely, as a beacon of man’s progressive evolution from terrestrial prisoner to celestial astronaut.

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The similarities between surgeons and bomber pilots