A view from the coffee room… on communication in the OR

LARP, live action role play, is immersive role-playing where participants physically and mentally/emotionally portray their characters, interact in real-world settings, and shape the story through improvisation. There are not many chances for surgeons to LARP during professional hours. Well, other than occasionally LARP internist, when someone asks about medicines.

Medical research and writing have changed after introduction to LLMs, large language models, such as ChatGPT (OpenAI, San Francisco, CA, USA) launched Nov 30, 2022.  LLMs employ neural network and have been trained to understand and generate human language and  produce human-like responses1.

Now really personal stuff: I am very reluctant to talk about me. I am more into talking about factual professional stuff. Nonetheless I was asked by BJS Academy to write about my path from there to here. How to solve this problem? I solved this by making a very boring bullet point list of turning points in my life. Then I entered this list into the AI podcast generator.

Hear, Hear, a lot of wows, ooohhs, love its and I like that’s, with an American accent. Not exactly what we call European mentality and certainly not Scandinavian or Finnish. Listening to this was balancing between embarrassment and proud - in the beginning. The further the podcast got, the better I felt. Actually, it is quite good to hear voices talk about you enthusiastically.

Residency, and especially surgical residency is hard1. Burnout, depression, harassment, emotional exhaustion, and stress are way too familiar with current surgery residents2-7. Unfortunately, the situation has not changed much since I was resident8, 9. But what has changed is that we acknowledge this now. I have to say though, it is good that I did not read these articles before I started my surgical career about 27 years ago.

Surgery residency and residency in general changes previous personal relationships and this is tied to evolving professional identity10. Strange working hours, and patient-doctor relationship confidentiality may lead to fewer talking points with non-medical friends and family11. Further, these relationships with non-medical friends and family may not thus provide the support they used to,11, 12 especially when dealing with work-life and residency.