Dr. Resa Lewiss is a pioneer in the use of ultrasound as an everyday tool for doctors (or as they call it in the field, point-of-care ultrasound), rather than reserving it for more exotic cases: it’s a bit like treating ultrasound as like a stethoscope rather than a CAT scan. She has a TEDMed talk about the field:
How do you come up with such a novel idea? Well, if a recent piece in Academic Life and Emergency Medicine offers any guide, one of the things you do is practice deliberate rest. As Lewiss put it in a 2015 interview, we should “Never underestimate the power of nature, exercise, and the arts to inspire productivity, creativity and working smarter.”
In , I talk about innovative doctors who discover the value of deliberate rest. The great neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, for example, was an avid sailor, athlete and gardner (he had grown up on a farm in rural Wisconsin), and he made time for those things despite running the Montreal Neuroscience Institute. He was also a great advocate of active, deliberate rest: as he put it in an essay written before I was born, “rest, with nothing else, results in rust.” Likewise, the biophysicist and medical imaging pioneer Britton Chance spent 12-hour days in the lab, but spent his weekends sailing; in fact, he was so serious a sailor that he took a year off to train for the 1952 Olympics– and won a gold medal.
Anyway, it’s great to see that despite all the pressures of professional life today, there are still people who show that you can do great work and take rest seriously.
