Winter 2000 Newsletter

It is my sincere wish to send you my best greetings for you and your families for the first year of the new century and the new millennium. As I write these lines and as the last days of the "ancient" times go by, a number of questions arise which I had not allowed to surface before. But now I guess I cannot avoid them ­ here they are.

What will the new century bring for us? How shall the world look 50 years from now? What shall medicine, orthopaedics and sports medicine look like? What will genetic medicine have done for (or to) human beings? How about resources and energy? And finally, what shall ISAKOS look like?

Time is limited for such thoughts, and time may be too short since we are all absorbed in our jobs ­ as doctors for our patients, always ready to give a few words of consolation and hope; as doctors for our athletes and trainers, chasing from one game to the other; as partners in a group of physicians, keen on proving our ability to bring in numerous patients; as researchers and scientists, running from one meeting to the other, and as chairmen of orthopaedic departments or research institutes, constantly annoyed by administration, insurance lawyers and beleaguering patients. We are also caught in the "output" of papers that are published in so many journals, now lying on our desks, so many that we cannot read them all anymore. And as shareholders, we open the newspaper to the only two relevant pages of the stock market. (2,400 years ago, Hippocrates said doctors should never become "economists," and he meant it in the truest sense of the word.)

There is a recent study from the British National Health Service, telling us that orthopaedic surgeons working to the age of 65 drop dead at an average of 18 months later, while they will survive another 15 years if they had only worked until age 60. (My friends from France tell me it is worse there, since they work until they die.)

Well, what sort of a message is this? Are we ready to take off for a monastery? (There are many beautiful ones in Switzerland, Scotland, China and India.) On the other hand, our job is probably one the most fascinating and rewarding ones, making it even more difficult to step back and make some distance. This message, therefore, is not meant as a memento mori, but as encouragement, especially for the younger ones, to use their energy to reduce these potentially overwhelming and hazardous circumstances of a clinical and scientific career.

It is therefore important to sometimes put those working tools away and to polish some visions.

For Christmas I was given a pair of boxer shorts with hundreds of phrases printed on them, all stating, "Less is more." Regardless of what it referred to, it made me lean back a bit. I assume it might be unusually appropriate to share some of my thoughts with you in our first newsletter of the millennium.

My wish to is to manage...

• Not to burn out but instead, slow down the pace;
• To find the time to solve your own problems and not only those of others;
• To devote more time to your individual patients and find time for your residents and colleagues at the hospital;
• To bring more honesty to your research so that reading journals makes you feel surrounded by friends and not outlawed because your results might be much lousier;
• To find time for sports once or twice a week;
• To spend more time with your closest friend(s); and
• To be close to your family and your spouse every day.

"Less is more." With these words I wish you to achieve "more."

P.S. Your most important jobs for the year 2000:

• First, pay your dues, if they are overdue;
• Second, bring a new ISAKOS member to Montreux ­ work on it, actively, constantly, during the entire day;
• Third, be healthy and happy.