Prospects and Dialogues

2022 Career Development Seminar by the Association of Chinese American Physicians (ACAP) Come and hear our speakers share and discuss their advice and personal experiences about residency, fellowship, application tips, interview skills, job search; as well as topics related to running your own medical practice. This event is free to the public. Save the date: sunday, march 27, 2022 10am – 1pm Registration and agenda coming soon!

Much has been made of the use of “contact tracing” to document and inform people who have been in close contact with someone who tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Close contact is defined as a close, physical or proximate and sustained contact with a person for 15 minutes or more. And this definition in itself is problematic because the virus doesn’t always abide by exact distances and wrist watches. But for now those will be the metrics used to attempt to locate, talk with and...

We as humans are incredibly unique creatures. We are intelligent, rational and emotional which separate us from most other creatures on this planet. But we are most unique not because we possess language or think, but possess the capacity to play. By play I don’t mean put Legos together, or chase one and other in circle, but that we can lay out rules and guidelines, and stand together, and cooperate. In sports, we set aside our greatest differences and celebrate each other. In sports, no...

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” – Albert Einstein, misattributed to Charles Darwin Perhaps one of the greatest intellectual challenges for me as budding scientist and aspiring physician was understanding the concept of “natural selection,” a term I feel perpetrates a great deal of misunderstanding in science, specifically the concept of evolution. I suspect this is the case because the idea of “selection” quite naturally conjures to mind a selector as the...

By Elleen Xue, Founder of AAMS Forum Zoom Video Recording: https://youtu.be/kd65edEUaUw Thank you guys for participating in the Asian American Medical Society’s first forum! Allow me to introduce myself again. I am Elleen Xue, president of AAMS and a rising senior at Blair Academy in New Jersey. I am interested in becoming a surgeon, and possibly focusing in the specialty of neuro or reconstructive surgery. My co-host, Eddie Zhang, is both the vice-president and a rising junior at the St.

2021.8 by Elleen Xue When the crystal ball isn’t so clear . . . . . . one looks to the murkiness in the sphere. Having one foot in the eastern hemisphere and one foot in the western one, in real time, afforded me a unique view of the pandemic. I know, I know, you have read a trillion articles on the pandemic (and here I take the liberty of using hyperbole by exaggerating by orders of magnitude the numbers of cases of the crown prince pestilence) but alas I digress… Just how was it that data...

August 2020 by Elleen Xue “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” – Albert Einstein, misattributed to Charles Darwin Perhaps one of the greatest intellectual challenges for me as budding scientist and aspiring physician was understanding the concept of “natural selection,” a term I feel perpetrates a great deal of misunderstanding in science, specifically the concept of evolution. I suspect this is the case because the idea of “selection” quite naturally conjures...

2021.6 by Elleen Xue Today I decided to spook myself and take a break off the beaten track while hiking through nearby Grove Street Cemetery, where many local and university luminaries are buried. And there, in the furthest northwest corner, was a tract of plain-looking graves of renowned Yale professors, many of who died childless and never married. Then, as I stared down at the flickering and tremulous shadow of an elm leaf hovering over a name, I had a eureka moment. The grave was that of...

May 2021 by Elleen Xue Perusing the pages of my digital MIT Technology Review, my eyes became arrested by a photo of what seemed like a paradox: an image that looked as if an IKEA store had married a hospital, and I grew both puzzled and transfixed. For an Italian photo, this one was the least polychromatic I had ever seen. It was mostly black and white, with splashes of bold color only here and there, unlike the live Italy I was accustomed to on holidays with my parents. But what...

Feb 2021 by Elleen Xue “Life without art is torture.” – Caravaggio As the once in a century Coronavirus pandemic set it, I was essentially shut in. How would I pass the time? And luckily for me, I had some literature to help me get through it. The first book I turned to was a small, pocket book green hardcover of Albert Camus’s The Plague. Camus set the plight in Algeria around the turn of the 20th century and presaged many phenomenon I saw here. Beyond the emotions of panic and despair...

June 2020 By Elleen Xue The terror of this year’s novel coronavirus was something the world has never seen in that the last serious worldwide epidemic, unlike localized ones such as SARs and Ebola, played out on social media and television. This, combined with instantaneous communication and air travel, meant the virus was the first truly global pandemic to play out like a horror show. Most people sat glued to their television sets watching ominous death tolls mount as chyrons blared even...

April 2020 by Elleen Xue As a teenager who has grown up exposed to both Eastern and Western hemispheres, I’m usually caught in betwixt and in between the predominant sentiments expressed therein, and most recently found myself at odds with my family over the issue of the coronavirus. But more than just finding myself at odds with my them, I found myself at odds with China. Paying attention, of course, to the early days of the pandemic, one could not help but notice the extent to which China...

As confirmed cases of a novel virus surge around the world with worrisome speed, all eyes have so far focused on a seafood market in Wuhan, China, as the origin of the outbreak. But a description of the first clinical cases published in The Lancet on Friday challenges that hypothesis. The paper, written by a large group of Chinese researchers from several institutions, offers details about the first 41 hospitalized patients who had confirmed infections with what has been dubbed 2019 novel...

Chinese authorities have launched an investigation into a mysterious viral pneumonia which has infected dozens of people in the central city of Wuhan. A total of 44 cases have been confirmed so far, 11 of which are considered "severe", officials said on Friday. The outbreak has prompted Singapore and Hong Kong to bring in screening processes for travellers from the city. It comes amid online fears the virus could be linked to Sars, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. The potentially...

Nov 2019 by Elleen Xue Beware the dreaded Mei ban fa in Chinese, whose mere utterance is experienced like a punch in the stomach, and is among the most dreaded of expressions in the Mandarin language. But the saying is more than just words; it expresses a requisite lack of emotion and learned helplessness, or acceptance of fate that my parent’s generation seems to have embraced from their parents, and an attitude my generation abhors, but can understand. Mei ban fa roughly translates to...