It’s a tenet of American culture that if you try hard, you’ll succeed. Hard work pays off. The early bird gets the worm. No goal met without sweat. But, try telling this to sperm. It’s always been thought that the best looking, fastest moving sperm wins the egg. It’s why Woody Allen in Hannah and...Continue reading
Tag: fatherhood
A Special March Madness Bro Weekend
Here’s a notion from the natural world: there’s safety in numbers. Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. But why is mass behavior safer? Apparently because having many eyes allows for earlier threat recognition and herds offer dilution of danger to individuals within it. Even in humans, research has shown that...Continue reading
How to Impress Her on Valentine’s Day
You asked her for a date on Valentine’s Day. Now what? You really want to impress her. Dinner and a movie? A dinner show? Just dinner? A ball game? Hot tubbing or a spa? Karaoke? Salsa dancing? Split some chocolate lava cake? The pressure is on. It must be perfect. What’s a guy to do?...Continue reading
Helping Wounded Veterans Live and Love
His kidney harbored a cancer and it needed to be removed. As a first year surgeon-in-training, I was consenting him for surgery at the Veterans Hospital in Philadelphia. Unlike most patients, he was unusually calm as I talked him through the procedure and its potentially life threatening complications. At one point, he gently put his...Continue reading
The Flipside of Living Forever
Name some issues brand new to this world in the last 100 years. How about nuclear war, environmental pollution and climate change? Medically, we can blame carpal tunnel syndrome on the typewriter or computer keyboard, and “automobile knee” on that awful car commute. Hard to know whether these marks on modern society are preferable to...Continue reading
The Boy with the Varicocele
The case of the month is an actual patient of The Turek Clinic His head was topped with bobbing red hair and his face full of freckles. Thin as a beanpole, he spoke softly as if trying to control his cracking pubertal voice. All in, he appeared to be the stuff that teenage boys are...Continue reading
A Tale of Three Testicles
Its funny what people think about every day. Some decide exactly where to paint the lines in our streets. Others, called Gumbusters, remove gum stuck to park benches. Jelly Doughnut Fillers do precisely that, and Golf Ball Divers find stray golf balls that land underwater. And what would casinos do without certified Dice Inspectors? Better...Continue reading
Making Mapping Matter
She approached the microphone slowly from the back of the room, appearing to float, wrapped in her colorful hijab. A doctor from Pakistan, she had some questions and a comment after hearing my talk. A Kind Interrogation “Your Sperm Mapping technique for azoospermic men” she stated softly, “is it done under just local anesthesia?” “Yes,” I responded....Continue reading
A Toast to the Jewels on World Vasectomy Day
You might think that publicly celebrating vasectomies is like celebrating root canals! But think about it. You have a root canal to relief pain and to be able to eat again, but you have vasectomy not only for you, but also for others, like family, and for the world at large. It’s taking one for...Continue reading
MicroTESE vs. FNA Mapping: Medieval or Modern?
Put two experts in a room and give each of them the same problem to solve. What you’ll find is that they typically use similar “knowledge structures” and “heuristic strategies” (i.e. organized and principled thinking) and then proceed to break the problem into smaller, more digestible ones to solve it. But, despite similar cognitive approaches, the solutions...Continue reading