Doctors

Patients in Alexandria, La., were the friendliest people Dr. Muhammad Tauseef ever worked with. They'd drive long distances to see him, and often bring gifts.

"It's a small town, so they will sometimes bring you chickens, bring you eggs, bring you homemade cakes," he says.

One woman even brought him a puppy.

"That was really nice," he says.

Tauseef was born and raised in Pakistan. After going to medical school there, he applied to come to the U.S. to train as a pediatrician.

Doctors are obsessed with time.

It comes down to simple math. If I have four hours to see a dozen patients, there simply isn't much time to stray from the main agenda: What ails you?

Frequently harried, I avoid drug company salespeople. Their job is to get face time with me and convince me quickly of the merits of their products.

Part 4 of the TED Radio Hour episode Courage.

About Leana Wen's TED Talk

Doctors in the U.S. don't have to tell patients about conflicts of interest. When physician Leana Wen asked her fellow doctors to open up, the reaction she got was frightening.

About Leana Wen

When people hear that I'm an emergency physician, they often ask, "What's the craziest thing you've ever seen?"

TV shows frequently show ER doctors and nurses heroically saving people on the verge of death. Then there are news reports about people abusing the health care system by seeking emergency care for minor problems that could be better handled in a doctor's office.

I see those things. But the extremes don't paint a full picture of the urban ER that is the center of my working life. So allow me to introduce you to some of the people I saw in the ER on a recent day.

Dr. Oliver Korshin practices ophthalmology three days a week in the same small office in east Anchorage, Alaska, he's had for three decades. Many of his patients have aged into their Medicare years right along with him.

For his tiny practice, which employs just one part-time nurse, putting all his patients' medical records in an online database just doesn't make sense, Korshin says. It would cost too much to install and maintain — especially considering that he expects to retire in just a few years.

Doctors rarely talk about death.

Mostly it's because we're in the business of trying to help people prolong their lives, which almost always makes death an unwelcome topic of discussion.

Too often, death is seen as failure, though it shouldn't be. Death is a natural part of the cycle of our lives.

Troy and Alana Pack had spent the day at their neighborhood Halloween party in Danville, a suburb of San Francisco. Ten-year-old Troy went as a baseball player, and 7-year-old Alana was a good witch. In the afternoon, they changed out of their costumes and set out for a walk with their mother. Destination: Baskin-Robbins.

"Alana, she liked anything with chocolate," says their father, Bob Pack. "Troy, for sure, bubble gum ice cream, because he liked counting the bubble gums that he would get."

Here are three words you don't often see in close proximity: Good. Death. Ebola.

Yet there they stand, united in the headline for an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine this month: "A Good Death: Ebola and Sacrifice."

Brian Goldman is an emergency room physician who has worked at Mount Sinai Hospital in downtown Toronto for more than 20 years. He's also a prominent medical journalist and the host of CBC Radio's White Coat, Black Art. He says every doctor makes mistakes but medicine's culture of denial keeps doctors from talking about and learning from those mistakes.

The way American doctors are trained needs to be overhauled, an expert panel recommended Tuesday, saying the current $15 billion system is failing to produce the medical workforce the nation needs.

In the past several months, Dr. Sheik Umar Khan has been a leader in the fight against the deadliest and largest Ebola outbreak in history.

Khan, 39, has treated over 100 Ebola patients in Sierra Leone. He's a "national hero," the country's health minister said Tuesday.