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First… Do No Harm
As you are reading this, I’m unconscious…
As you are reading this, I’m unconscious. Or, at least I was floating slightly above planet Earth earlier today, just an hour or so after scheduling this post so you could read it. Yet another surgery to redo work I had done years ago — 28 years, to be exact — after surviving cancer treatments. I’ve come to the point in my life where I accept this as yet another challenge to overcome. By finding the best doctors and hospitals for what I need, the stress is low and my expectations remain high. The drugs coursing through my veins give me a whole new outlook on my life and the possibilities for the future when I awake. And the doctors have promised to do no harm, so there’s that.
In a day and age of global warming, pandemics, and cryptocurrency, doing no harm takes on an entirely new meaning. In Latin, this is primum non nocere or primum nil nocere. Many believe this phrase to have come from Hippocrates, but it is not included in the Hippocratic Oath. The exact origin of this phrase is uncertain. Some early versions of the Hippocratic Oath include the promise “to abstain from doing harm” but do not include the precise phrase. Perhaps the closest approximation in the Hippocratic Corpus (a collection of around 60 early Ancient Greek medical works strongly associated with the physician Hippocrates and his teachings) is in Epidemics: “The physician…
