Saad Shaikh, MD

  I took this photo last year in Yellowstone national park in Wyoming as a family of Elk came by to have lunch. I sat still, mostly as I did quietly took the picture. I had been for hours. I wasn't checking my cell phone, just sitting and observing everything.  We forget that we, too, are nature. I had a fellow once who was full of energy, had lots of questions, and whose mind ran a lot faster than mine. My fellows get interesting assignments; some, who told me they never looked up at the stars, accompany me to a planetarium and a night sky watch, others I've had do a "Big Year" which is keeping a list of all the birds they see or hear over the course of their fellowship. They aren't allowed to graduate unless they turn in both a procedure log and a big year list. As an aside, Steve Martin and Jack Black made a really funny movie about their Big Year a while back.  When you sit still long enough, without checking your phone, or a boo...

     I was walking through Kathmandu a few years back when I came across the plates at a local street corner stand. What struck me was how beautifully simple, and elegant the whole concept was. All made from plant materials and all biodegradeable. Here, we have “trash.” Yes, there’s recycling but it’s still built on the concept of trash, not conscious consumption. Indigenous peoples had a different understanding of their place on this planet and their relationship to nature, before our culture destroyed theirs. Unlike the modern western mythology that has us lord over nature, where plants, trees and animals are subjugated to our use, while we destroy this planet and soon others through non conscious consumption, they didn’t have a concept of trash. Every part of any animal and nature was used and reused and everything was biodegradeable. Even shit was properly biodegraded. S.O.S. We are the only animal species on this planet that saves ou...

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...

Lunch teaching conferences began with the resonant sounds of this Buddhist singing bowl I bought some years back in Kathmandu.* On the whiteboard across the room, on any given day you might find a zen koan, a kikuyu proverb, or something in Japanese (the Japanese and Germans have a word for everything but my favorite was tsundoku - Japanese for all the books you've bought and haven't read, and I have several). For anyone conditioned by their training in modern medicine, it was so very different. The purpose of all of this was to draw the audience in to the present moment, away from a busy day in clinic or operating room, where reality is just the sound of the bowl ringing, and not the abstraction of life, and medicine, in the symbols and thoughts resonating in our heads, past and future. And yet, it couldn't but remind me of the temple bells from Nanzen-ji temple I would hear while strolling along the Philosopher's Path in Kyoto years ag...