En Garde!
By Erich S. Huang, MD, PhD
Every Thursday night, I find myself facing an opponent brandishing a fencing sabre on a narrow strip, 14 meters long by 2 meters wide, called a piste. Hooked up to an electrical circuit, wearing high-tensile fencing whites and metallic jackets, we face each other. My adversary’s intent is oblique, hidden in shadows behind the mesh of a fencing mask—does he expect to make a “first intention” attack? Or is he inviting me to attack, allowing him to score a touch with a “second intention” parry, then riposte? Once the judge commands “fence!” initiative and intention may change many times in the course of a single touch between us.
Approaching Health Data Science with Humility
By Erich S. Huang, MD, PhD
A “code” — the medical response to a person going into cardiopulmonary arrest — at once represents both the triumph and failure of modern medicine. Viewed from one angle, we see an impressively universal, uniform approach that rigorously applies life-saving techniques, allowing us to yank a patient back from the precipice thanks to teamwork and an extraordinary suite of technology. But there’s another side: the sheer, violent unexpectedness of a code. Pounding on someone’s chest and shocking them is not an expected outcome for just about any intervention – by definition, something has gone awry.
What Health Data Science and Raising Chickens Have in Common
By Erich S. Huang, MD, PhD
In my most recent blog post, I wrote about Susan Jones*, a 65 year-old patient and Medicare recipient, and described how a multidisciplinary team at Duke constructed an AI-powered workflow to help patients like her.
