Author: Joe Kaempf

How does a pregnant woman effectively and safely minimize or treat physical pain?  Are any medications safe for her developing fetus? What are the…

Hypothesis – Therapy X prevents Disease Z and is safe.  So,….let’s randomize 30,000 people into two groups of 15,000 apiece (A and B). Give…

I love science,….but am forever wary of scientism. Science is observation, measurement, hypothesis-testing, the constant re-adjustment of theories after bias is minimized and experience is…

Studying the Vermont Oxford Network Annual Report every Autumn was a delight for me starting back in the 1990’s (the “phone book”).  The information…

Apothegms are concise insights addressing Nature’s mystery, and my favorite genre of aphorisms.  Meaningful apothegms avoid cliché, over-simplification, and speak to life-as-lived, in particular…

An abstruse first sentence truncates our yearn to learn.  It dispirits us,……so many books and manuscripts, and so little time.  Worse, it fills turbid…

“Remembrance of things past is not the remembrance of things as they were” wrote Marcel Proust. Vladimir Nabokov observed  “The more you love a memory the…

I possess an unwarranted, requited love of first sentences. No special virtue or wisdom, just an obsession.  Fiction,….non-fiction,….essays,….PowerPoints,….lectures,….text messages.  I try to keep forefront…

Today we struggle with COVID-19, climate change, sectarianism, inequalities,…..yet compared to 75 years ago (specifically August 6, 1945), perhaps our desiderata could be better understood…

At a QI conference last year a well-known speaker displayed a slide with a photograph of W. Edwards Deming (the ‘father of quality improvement’)…