Pchum Ben is a national religious festival in Cambodia. It’s a time when families pay their respects to their dearly departed — those relatives that walked the earth before us, those who lived, laughed, cried and prayed in an era when we were not necessarily present.
The ceremony involves the offering of food from the living to the dead, as the ghosts of bygone relatives temporarily waken from their perceived existence …
The operating room is a sanctuary
Phnom Penh is changing at an incalculable rate. It is evolving so quickly that even from my last visit four years ago, I barely recognize the streets I once shuffled my well-worn sandals through. Now, the streets of my old neighborhood are proudly adorned with a new facade of artistic, stylish restaurants and a collection of boutique coffee shops. Bigger buildings and prime real estate positions are now occupied by …
I am the “same-same but different”
Medical and surgical research is breaking boundaries at an astounding pace. From genetic modification and stem cell therapy to robotic and 3-D printing technology, scientific advancement is finding novel, unique and unprecedented solutions to complex, challenging diseases. Indeed, such is the rate of change that I am certain the last eight years of my surgical training in the UK will likely be rendered obsolete within the next twenty years of …
This frontier of medicine and surgery has been largely ignored for many years
In February 2010, I completed my final ward round and said goodbye to my patients in Haiti just six weeks after a tragic earthquake. This earthquake was a natural disaster so devastating that within a momentary blink, a minute’s tremor and a rumbling collapse, an estimated one-hundred-thousand people lost their lives.
Amidst the wreckage, hundreds of thousands more were left severely injured, shocked, …
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