Saad Shaikh, MD

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Saad Shaikh (@eyeislife) … the instrument plays itself. -  J.S. Bach      Writing, done, well is a way to be present. My experience with handwriting began in 2nd grade where, in a school in Los Angeles, I first introduced to cursive. We had to hold our pen properly, two fingers, not three, gracefully, and lightly, with the pencil just floating in your hand, and not squeezing the life out of the pencil, paper at the right slant and then practice, practice, practice. If you have callouses on your fingers from holding your writing instrument you are holding it wrong!     I  grew up with script and by the time I was in college at UCLA all my notes were in cursive, and then that carried on to medical school, and then private practice. In clinic, I began using a fountain pen, at first the disposable plastic ones with ink cartridges and then when the lids k...

Excerpt from  The Wisdom of the Knife. Zen in the Art of Surgery The more you know, the less you understand -  lao tzu      ...  Surgeons always start their careers with someone else’s style. That’s understandable. You have to start somewhere. It’s moronic to reinvent the wheel, and you don’t want to make unnecessary mistakes. If you watch enough surgery you’ll recognize certain styles and schools of training like you see in the martial arts. There’s tradition, pride, and a whole lot of ego involved. Some surgeons take the style they’ve trained with and add to it, improving on it, finding new efficiencies, incorporat­ing advances in instrumentation and tech­nology. Others depend only on what they once learned. That’s who you don’t want to be. The surgeon incapable of exceeding his style grows old, literally. He is incap­able of seeing a fundamental truism in surgery – that the law of imper­manence pervades everything, sur...