Thomas Welch

To the casual observer, life in medicine today may seem intolerable. Countless reports, in both the peer reviewed and lay literature, draw attention to the problem of “burnout.” Our students, residents, and attendings are regularly surveyed to determine the extent of the problem. Solutions seem a bit harder to find.

Firearm injuries are the leading cause of death in children older than one year.

As a nephrology fellow many decades ago, I orchestrated exhaustive workups, including renal arteriography, on some hypertensive children. While such investigations rarely uncovered important causes of hypertension, they were felt to be necessary in an era when the prevailing ethos was that children rarely had “essential” hypertension.