When Medicine and Media Meet

I decided to spend the money and purchase a ticket for the Arizona Speaker Series. The line-up features some of the most interesting people of our time from across a variety of industries and political backgrounds.
First up in the series was Sanjay Gupta, M.D., chief medical correspondent at CNN, who just also happens to be an author and a practicing neurosurgeon. And, yeah, he was selected as a White House Fellow, serving as a special advisor to First Lady Hillary Clinton.
He primarily reports on health and medical news for all of CNN’s shows domestically and internationally, and contributes to CNN.com. from such places as war zones and natural disasters on topics like the  Ebola outbreak, brain injury, disaster recovery, health care reform, fitness, military medicine and HIV/AIDS, to name a few.
Needless to say, the talk was full of interesting anecdotes and lessons learned along the way.  Some of the nuggets I walked away with:

• We need to continue to keep humanism in all discussions. It is the only way we can be proactive and constructive.
• It is our responsibility to be compelled to see and do things differently. It is through this that compassion arises.
• We are storytellers by nature. Balance hope and optimism with honesty to tell a good story.
• As a society we need to be “reciprocal altruists.” It feels good to do good.

And as any good doctor is known to do, he made sure he told us to eat right, exercise, drink plenty of water and get a good night’s sleep.