It always feels so short

It always feels so short, but six weeks goes by quickly.

I'm back home, after 156 cases on 77 patients followed by a week in Europe for the wedding of two beautiful people.

Thank you for following. Until next time.

The 20% Oath

Last week, The New York Times published an article entitled "A Promise to Be Ethical in an Era of Immorality". It tells the story of a number of student-led initiatives in American business schools toward developing an oath for B-school graduates.

The oath—its content varies by school—pledges the students to, in the words of the article, "act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their 'own narrow ambitions' at the expense of others."

For millennia, physicians have made similar vows:

I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.... In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients.

Many trades act similarly, and, to take the article at face value, business school seems to be catching up. But this is, by far, not the most interesting part of the piece.

No. It's glossed over in the article, but what boggles the mind is that only twenty percent of the graduating business school class at the institution profiled had actually agreed to the oath.

Eighty percent of business school graduates could not agree to acting responsibly and ethically!

Does this bother anyone else besides me? I warrant that probably somewhere on the order of eighty percent of physicians also do not abide by the Hippocratic Oath, but at least we all take it. At least we all promise to try to live up to its standards, and, I'd wager, most of us do so without our fingers surreptitiously crossed.

Are business school students simply more honest? Is it simply a case of, "I know I'm going to break this, so why take the oath in the first place?"

Or is there something more telling going on? Perhaps it's my naivete, but in light of the etiology of our current economic downturn, I'll admit that the other 80% bother me. Deeply.

Home

I suppose it's time.

I've been avoiding writing this one last post out of denial—if I write it, it means it's true. It means the year is over, Africa is over, and the "real" world is real again.

But, these last two weeks have forced itself upon my psyche, with a stubbornness surpassing that of Macarthur's promise to the Philippines. The real world has returned. And it bears a striking resemblance to what it was when I left.

It is strange to think that, just twelve days ago, I was sitting on a ramshackle dock in an impoverished country in West Africa, debating whether the rainy season had actually started or whether it was just being coy. People warned that returning to the west would make you feel like what had happened to you in Africa was just a dream.

And it's true. It's amazing how easy it is to slip back into western culture, to slip back into home. But it's home, redefined, and it's western culture seen through a pair of changed lenses.

Here's hoping those lenses remain changed.