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Opinion: Connecting with patients can keep physicians from becoming ‘uncomfortably numb’

A simple yet remarkable adjustment in how my team prepares for surgery has forever changed the way we now practice medicine.

As a surgeon who specializes in gynecologic cancer, I have performed thousands of operations over my two-decade career. But the ones my team and I have done since the beginning of this year have been the most fulfilling. The reason? A simple yet remarkable adjustment in how we prepare for surgery has forever changed the way we now practice medicine.

The first of these “new” operations started when I asked to have — a title so dripping with irony that it was impossible for the team not to notice (more on that later) — playing

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