Saad Shaikh, MD

  I took this picture back in the summer of 2017.  What stood out to me about that time was that there were very few tourists anywhere, especially around the pyramids, and it wasn't  because it was 110 degrees that day. I was traveling with my family and it was our first day in Cairo. We were staying at the Sheraton on the Nile, and that morning, as we were leaving our hotel, I noticed there was a well-dressed gentleman in our group, which was odd because we were supposed to be the only ones on the tour. "Who is that joining us?" I asked the hotel lobby representative "Oh, you're Americans. All Americans are assigned a bodyguard. He will be with you throughout your time here in Cairo. His name is Ali." And with that, he pulled open his jacket to show me his submachine gun, and off we went. We visited the pyramids, the Manshiyat Nasr district, and Al-Azhar that day, and I had a great time chatting and eating with Ali. Apparent...

  I took this photo when in San Miguel Allende two year ago. What I loved most about the small Mexican towns and cities are their zocalos. At the zocalo, or main square, one finds a church (which before the Spaniards arrived would have been a temple), often a gazebo where local bands play music or young women are taking photos for the quincinieras, and various other evening happenings. I am sure people have been gathering in these centers for ages and still it seem like everyone in town makes it to the zocalo to watch the sunset and the church lights turn on and just hang out. So whenever I travel to Mexico, if there happens to be a zocalo nearby, I do as the locals do and make sure I find somewhere to sit comfortably in the evening and just observe the crowds and the ambience around me - oh and the things you'll see. Sometimes you'll catch a young man proposing to his girlfriend, but to he'll sing her favorite songs with a mariachi band he...

Your Page Title   I took this photo while traveling through New Zealand a few years ago. That was such a lovely trip. I had rented an old Japanese car with about 300,000 KM on it and all the announcement and display markers were in Japanese, but it ran perfectly. I drove it all across the North and South Island, stopping at places to sit and reflect, organize (and still now learn to let go) my thoughts, and just reflect on the beauty of the plants and the glacial lakes. I saw this Tiki in the Botanical Garden in Auckland and you have to look really closely to even find it, as it blends so perfectly in to the environs.   The thing about tikis is that the local Maori Islanders believed they protected the land. They, like many indigenous cultures I have visited in my travels, did not have a concept of property. Agrarian cultures do and that concept of property even included humans. The Declaration of Independence in its first drafts did not read...

Your Page Title   "Am I on the menu?" I took this photo in front of the bed and breakfast, Case de Olas, I was staying at in Puerto Escondido, a small beach town on the pacific coast of Mexico. In the evenings, everyone gathered on the beach to watch the sunset and some played a multi note drum, and the sunsets were gorgeous.  In the daytime, I would take a yoga class on the rooftop in the morning and afternoon. I had been looking at this turkey each time I left my room to go in to town for lunch or dinner, but then on the way back I caught him in this perfect pose. Yes, I realize that the entire storyline of the photo is my own projection, but nevertheless, stories only means things to humans anyways. A year later, I was back again at the same place, but he was no where to be found. I hope he didn't end up on the menu.

Your Page Title   "I have never looked up at the stars" so said one of the residents in my noon conference at the VA Hospital in Orlando where I use to head up the residency and fellowship programs. I use to throw some of my photographic work in between the other more conventional teaching slides to break the monotony of the conference. There also would be a Zen koan or interesting vocabulary word of the day on the whiteboard (like Tsundoku - all the books you've bought and haven't read) and conference would start with the ringing of a Buddhist singing bowl but that's a story for another day. The goal was to break up the ordinary and to remember the forest. That medicine is observation just as life is as well, or should be. But, too often, in medicine physicians lose the forest for the trees. In any case, that weekend I had the group accompany me on a field trip to the Emil Buehler Planetarium here in Orlando and we all learned a...

The picture on the left are pink orchid flowers, and on the right a composite of normal human retinas. I took the one on the left with my Iphone but what struck me about it was how the vascular pattern of the flower resembled that of the retinas and the human body I have stared at so long in my clinical practice and while teaching in the anatomy labs in medical school. Life and all biology share a homology, and in the wisdom of the ancient Sanskrit, Tat Tvam Asi. So do you see yourself, perfect as you are, in the flower, in the person in front of you, when you look in the mirror, and in all of life itself? 

     No, I wasn't buying cocaine, but I did take this picture of a resident showing me an empty vial he picked up off the ground when he was talking me around the Rosinha favela in Rio de Janeiro. He was sponsored by the drug lord of the favela so I knew I would be in safe hands. The drugs lords take a commission of all activities in the favela but with that comes protection. The rules? Very simple. Nobody robs. Nobody hears. Nothing is lost. Those who are wise obey those give orders. He mentioned them to me and then I saw them later in some lovely artwork by Chilean artist, Jose Seleron at his Lapa steps. He showed me some videos of what happens when someone does break the rules, a sort of vigilante justice. A man who robbed a woman was later beaten by the drug lord's men with 2 by 4's on his arms and legs, a woman who did the same had half her head shaved off and was forced to live that way until it grew back. One is compelled to not brea...

       I want you to look at this photo ( Etlingera elatior, which I took at the botanical gardens in Rio de Janeiro), take a deep breath, maybe a cold shower, meditate a bit, do some yoga, sing a song, laugh, whatever it takes to pump up that vagal tone! Last week I was invited to give a lecture on Mindfulness, Meditation, & Medicine to the Lifestyle Medicine group at UCF. The lecture was attended by first and, mostly, second year medical students. We went over, the what, why, and how of meditation and mindfulness. Sadly, the practice of medicine in the modern era is rarely about wellness, but rather interventional disease management. Most healthcare providers aren't "well" themselves, much less their patients, and are caught in vicious, stress inducing circles both from personal choice and from circumstances out of their control. go to sleep). One of the topics that I like to bring up is the importance of vagal (nerve) tone...

My last fellow, in retinal diseases, came up to me one day and asked me about a diagnosis. She was so excited. It was her second day on the service, and the first day with me staffing her in clinic. She couldn't wait to present me with a detailed, and clear description of the pathology at hand, "there is this punched out lesion involving the outer segments of the retina and choriocapillaris, with pigmented edges, free of infiltrates.I just don't know what it is?" Well, what would you do? Would you give her the answer?  "Look, I am going to tell you what it is, but before I do, I want you to be present with this moment, and really enjoy it for what it is." It's that moment, of wonder, before you've labelled something, that you really see it for what it is. Once you give it a name, which is helpful for talking about it, and in medicine billing for seeing it, you never see it the same way again. You just glance over it. ...

The greatest carver does the least cutting. lao tzu   C an bruce lee teach you anything about surgery? That, like anything else, depends on the person being taught. Enter the Dragon, his last movie , opens with Lee having just pinned and tapped out his opponent. The scene changes. We find Lee in a monastery, on a lovely hill,   branches swaying in the wind, birds singing in the background, all very zen, when Lee begins to wax philosophical   Enter the Dragon was a cultural phenomenon. Released a few months after Lee’s untimely death, theaters were sold out everywhere. For many Westerners, it was their first introduction to Asian culture and philosophy, and for everyone it was the start of the martial arts phenomenon. Dojos opened every­where. Kung fu movies became the routine at cinemas, and Lee became a household legend. But more than anything else, the movie was a vehicle for Lee’s philosophy on life and the martial arts. Lee ...

  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...