WEBVTT
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You're on the train to find a surgeon.
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Like those guys who use the engineered robots invented to cut you open and fix stuff inside you?
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You don't know what a robot is.
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What year is this?
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1910?
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Yikes! We must have really switched to the wrong track somewhere along the line.
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Oh well, we'll let you out here.
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We'll catch up with the proper timeline and the invention of those robots later.
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See you in the future, and enjoy the New York of 1910.
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I step off the train and I look at my watch.
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It's been ten days since I left on the journey from Texas to New York to the minute.
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I was seeking a surgeon, and the journey was long and arduous.
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I've had the fear of sinking in a riverboat, being robbed on a train, and I've spent a fortune of time and money all while being sick to get here.
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Surgeons of the 1910s have reputations built from newspaper and radio, but that's not necessarily the same as surgical skill.
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I braved all that on the journey to New York because that's where people say the best surgeons are.
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On its surface, that could be entirely false.
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There are a few things that indicate there must be good surgeons here.
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One, there's a big population.
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Lots of people means lots of sources of talent.
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Two, there's money.
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And if you're skilled and you like money, you're seeking that.
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And three, there's a reputation.
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And that reputation draws in those looking for talent, and those customers draw in the talent.
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A virtuous cycle culminating in something that started as a possible fiction, becoming a truth if the reputation persists long enough.
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Now that I'm here, New York City feels louder than it needs to be.
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Carriages, horns, voices layered on top of one another.
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Brick buildings rise too close together, as if even the streets are competing for space.
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Everyone seems to be in a hurry, including the men in white coats, indifferent to the sick old man trying to find a hospital in a crowded city he's never been to.
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Of course this city is loud.
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Everyone is selling something.
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Being louder than the other guy is the way some people, like the newsies, for example, survive.
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Inside the hospital, the smell hits first.
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Chloroform, antiseptic, something sweet and chemical that makes it hard to tell whether this place exists to heal or to harm.
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I sit on a wooden bench, hat in my hands, watching names move through the building before I ever meet them.
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Names whispered by porters, names printed in newspapers, names repeated with confidence by people who sound like they know what they're talking about.
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One surgeon, Lawrence Ashford, is famous.
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His reputation even arrives before he does.
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I hear about his confidence, his decisiveness, the speed with which he works.
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While another surgeon, Samuel Smith, blends in.
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Dr.
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Samuel Smith.
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A name that doesn't announce itself.
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No stories trail behind him.
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No one lowers their voice when they speak his name.
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Dr.
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Ashford and Dr.
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Smith, they both seem capable, they both seem calm.
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They both wear the same coat.
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But I don't really know how to tell which one is better.
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How does someone make a life or death decision?
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Based on reputation, when skill is what matters.
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No charts line the walls.
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No numbers are offered.
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There is no ledger of outcomes, no public record of who lived cleaner lives afterward and who did not.
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There is only reputation.
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And reputation is unevenly distributed.
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I notice how people stand straighter around Dr.
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Ashford, the famous one.
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How his answers to questions are shorter, and how doubt seems unwelcome in his presence.
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With Dr.
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Samuel Smith, the questions linger longer.
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He listens more.
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He answers carefully.
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Seemingly competent, seemingly thoughtful, but seemingly isn't certainty.
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And my life is on the line.
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I make my guess.
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It's not a decision.
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Those require weighing out facts.
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There are none of those here.
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As they prepare me for surgery, I wonder if I've chosen wisely.
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As the mass lowers, the smell of chloroform thickens, and who knows what happens next.
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I have no idea how we've arrived in London.
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In this place, in this time, you can feel that the values of people are in plus.
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I'm sure the ships will in the history.
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We'll see it when we get fully back to the correct timeline, I'm sure.
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All you've done is get off the tree.
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The hospital's just around the corner, and it's time you see your patients.
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No more waiting.
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Gibble, gibble, gibble, gibble.
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It's the kind of smell that grows on a man after thirty years.
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The smell of familiarity.
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After being paged, I enter the room.
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A patient rests quietly.
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Sheets pulled to the chin, John Wickham hovers nearby, checking the chart, murmuring notes to himself.
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My eyes are scanning the patient and the chart.
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Dr.
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Wickham points to a column of data that I haven't seen before.
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What is this?
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I ask.
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I've never tracked these numbers before.
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Wickham glances at me.
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Recovery times.
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Complications that don't appear on mortality stats.
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Measures of trauma we can minimize.
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I've spent decades optimizing for outcomes.
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The ones the industry rewarded.
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Mortality.
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Obvious complications.
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Textbook recoveries.
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What was Wickham trying to do?
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So I ask him, and you care to measure these things?
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Why?
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Wickham smiles faintly.
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Because patients care.
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If we can shorten the time it takes to return to their life, isn't that what matters too?
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I look at the numbers again.
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Unsure.
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I don't have these numbers tracked for my patients.
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Do I need them?
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Back in my own office, Jack, my next surgical consult, is asking me questions.
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Your mortality rates?
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He asks.
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I present my record.
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Decades of experience, a steady hand, results that have stood the test of time.
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The patient nods, appreciating the history and data.
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I do nothing without multiple opinions, Jack says.
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That's wise, I tell him.
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Many patients return after other consultations because my experience carries weight.
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Later, as I walk past Wickham's office, I notice that he's speaking with Jack.
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Wickham's voice is calm, precise, careful.
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He's talking about his own mortality statistics.
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Slightly higher than mine, but still within safe ranges.
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Then he moves on to what no one else has measured.
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My focus is recovery, Wickham says.
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On average, patients return to normal life two months faster.
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Less pain, fewer complications that linger beyond the hospital.
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This is what matters to you, isn't it?
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The patient listens, eyes widening.
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You can tell for the first time he imagines life after surgery.
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Not just survival.
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His questions about mortality fade into the background.
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He is drawn to the life he could regain.
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Not just the life he could keep.
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Down the hallway, I continue eavesdropping.
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My chest tightening slightly for some reason.
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I've been in the upper echelons of surgical prestige, yet here a younger surgeon, less experienced in years, is teaching the patient about things I hadn't considered.
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Ignoring most of the hellos and Dr.
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Hawthorne attempts at my attention, my mind is fixated on these new metrics.
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They don't seem right to me, and I can't seem to focus on anything else at the moment.
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I reach the hospital administrator.
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I'm not sure what came over me, but I forgot to even knock.
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Instead saying, Do you know Dr.
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Wickham is tracking statistics no one else in the industry measures?
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And he's sharing them with patients to draw them here.
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The administrator raises an eyebrow, the kind of look you often see from administrators and bureaucrats who don't understand your technical concerns.
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Yes, and it's wrong.
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We've tracked mortality rates for decades.
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If optimizing these new metrics starts to affect those rates, or even just appears to, what will happen to the hospital, to our doctors, to our reputation?
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The administrator leans back.
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Dr.
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Wakeham is trending in the right direction.
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His mortality rates aren't rising.
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In fact, he's improving outcomes.
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Why is this panic necessary?
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I slammed the desk.
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Because it's uncontrolled.
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We built a hospital with prestige on mortality rates, and now he's rewriting the rules.
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The administrator remains calm, unconvinced by my fear.
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Most administrators are fed doom and gloom reports all day long.
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So they're like an impenetrable wall when it comes to emotional pleas.
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Perhaps it's time the rules reflected what patients actually care about, the administrator exclaims.
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Since mortality rates started as a measure, everyone has worked hard at making theirs exceptional.
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It's now hard to stand out as a hospital on that alone.
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We need something else to bring patients here.
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Rather than choosing to just go to their nearest hospital.
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In my opinion, Dr.
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Wickham is on to something good here, and his work is leading to lower costs for the hospital too.
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Less readmittance, less blood transfusion cost.
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I leave flustered, my chest tight, my mind racing.
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Am I a relic of the past?
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Is Wickham the future?
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Is my career hanging in the tension?
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It's been ten years since that day in the administrator's office.
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My career has reached terminal velocities since that day, and I've become a dinosaur.
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Dr.
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Wickham, on the other hand, is a star.
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He coined the term minimally invasive surgery.
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He's opened an institute to train others, creating culture where patient-centered measures drive practice by tracking data that matter to patients, not just what the industry measured.
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He has reshaped surgical priorities.
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And following that shift in value, he's reshaped the techniques that are used.
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Laparoscopic surgeries guided by cameras are now the norm rather than open surgeries.
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Training programs integrate these new methods.
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Mortality rates remain excellent, but recovery time, patient comfort, and long-term quality of life have become metrics surgeons cannot ignore.
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The field itself has bent.
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Most experienced practitioners are following reluctantly towards the values Dr.
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Wickham has championed.
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In fact, I'm stepping on a stage to present to a medical conference.
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Fifty surgeons seated in a medical theater designed for knowledge share.
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I've reached the tail end of my career and I have some lessons for those with decades left to go.
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Up on the stage, I begin my talk, opening up the conference where Dr.
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Wickham will speak later.
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While I'm a bit envious of Dr.
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Wickham, I'm also humbled that even though he was my junior and relied on my expertise at the beginning of his career, I had a privilege of working with a man who changed the entire industry.
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The lights dim and my presentation begins.
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I'm Dr.
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Reginald Hawthorne, 40 years as a surgeon.
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I should have seen this coming.
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I've been a doctor for decades.
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I've seen the evolution of surgical practice, recovery care, anesthesiological developments, diagnostic tooling developments.
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Nothing stays the same in this field forever.
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It's likely I should have been the one who saw what Dr.
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Wickham saw, and perhaps I did it one time.
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I just didn't care enough to experiment, to be a champion for the patients, and then once I had my data, campaign it across the industry.
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Dr.
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Wickham did.
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In fact, it's likely because I was focused in the wrong place.
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I was spending most of my available time honing my hands further, trying to make them legendary.
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Unfortunately, due to my bullheadedness and not realizing there is a plateau on the mortality metric beyond which hands have no further influence, I spent decades focused on the wrong problem.
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Rather than my hands going down in the history book as a surgeon, Dr.
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Wickham will be known as the man who changed surgery.
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Focusing on getting us all to understand, for two doctors with the same mortality rates, the one who has patients recovering the fastest is the most skilled.
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He's an admirable man, Dr.
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Wickham.
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You all are in attendance to hear from him, and it's my great honor to open for him.
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But before that, I want to share something honest with you.
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Years ago, before all of this caught on, Dr.
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Wickham was working on this alone.
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When I found out about these metrics he tracked, I was distracted and I was upset.
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My mind wouldn't get off of why.
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My frustration all those years back is gone.
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I'm too old to change what I focused on.
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However, I would let this be a lesson to all those pursuing fields like medicine.
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Values shift.
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Keep your eyes open on ways to do things better rather than following the same metrics as everyone else.
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If you hear of a doctor doing something that gets you fixated, angry, or otherwise emotional, sit with it longer, calm down, rationalize, try to understand whether they are correct.
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I didn't do enough of that.
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Dr.
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Wickham is an anomaly, a man so focused on how to do things right, to track things that matter to patients, yet also a risk taker and a change maker.
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This industry needs less Dr.
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Reginald Hawthorns, and it needs more Dr.
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John Wickham's.
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And that was it.
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I stepped off the stage, considering it an honor to even be in the same event with my protege, my colleague, my friend, John Wickham.
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Dr.
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John Wickham.
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And that was the last bit I ever contributed to the medical field.
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I couldn't help but wonder who out there is the next Dr.
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Wickham.
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And how could they possibly change this field in the same way?