I have an amazing friend

Well, okay, before you all explode in recriminations, I have lots of amazing friends.

But today I want to talk about one of them specifically. We are both on the board of Stanford Pride, and he is a third-year medical student at Columbia University in New York. His name is Bryan McColgan.

Bryan finds the time, even on days when he spent many hours in the pediatrics department or in the emergency room, to share his life as a medical student, and the important things he is learning, with anyone who cares. He does this on Twitter (his feed) a few times each day, and he also has a video log on Blogspot (here).

I'm almost addicted to his tweets, because they make me realize how complicated medicine is, how intimately connected it is to our society and civilization (e.g., his posts about how parents who look up symptoms on the Internet bring their children to the emergency room convinced that they have an extra rare serious disease, or the way overweight teenagers are victimized by their peers instead of getting encouragement), but also because on a personal basis I am discovering that Bryan is an exceptional individual.

He spent several months in Zimbabwe a couple of years ago, and has developed a deep appreciation and compassion for the plight of people who suffer from bad health care, malnutrition, and a criminally negligent, incompetent and/or corrupt government. And he so much wants to help, that I'm sure he'd go back to Africa in a heartbeat when he finishes his studies... except for the slight problem that he will be at least a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt from the cost of his medical studies. When you watch his videos and read his tweets, you really feel the goodness of this guy coming at you through the screen, and the next minute you're laughing when he tells you how cool it is when urologists blast kidney stones with lasers as if they were zapping aliens in a video game!

Anyway, instead of me continuing, you just need to do yourself a favor and read his tweets or watch his video clips. I guarantee you'll learn something, and one of them will be how immensely talented and generous some people can be.