Dr. Virtual and Dr. Personal: Finding the Right Place for Technology in Medicine

July 8, 2015 / vsweet / Featured, General / 1 Comment

Dr. S. was invited to Budapest to give a TEDx talk, and also to debate Dr. Bertalan Mesko MD PHD, a medical futurist, on Apps. v. Medicine, at the first Annual Brain Bar Budapest. She began the debate with a 2o minute talk on: Dr. Virtual and Dr. Personal, telling three stories about technology in medicine; The good, the bad, and the ugly. Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc2MqZR5x80

Practicing Slow Medicine: An Interview with Dr. Sweet

April 12, 2015 / vsweet / General / 1 Comment

Live interview in San Diego on Channel Six:

Overmedicalizing Death, Underspiritualizing Death, and—Could Death be Enjoyable?

February 11, 2015 / vsweet / General / No Comments

I’ll be leading a session, along with Dr. Grace Dammann, at the Third Annual meeting of the Lown Institute on Tuesday, March 10, 10:30 am, in the Omni Hotel, San Diego. The idea behind our session is this:

Since 1969, when Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross first published her groundbreaking book, On Death and Dying, we’ve come a long way towards making death and dying tolerable. Hospice units and hospice care; palliative medicine; advanced life directives; the concept of non-beneficence. And yet we’re still facing—for ourselves and our patients—an overmedicalized and underspiritualized death. What can we do about that? What’s in the way? For doctors, patients, and families? In institutions and the law? And what can we do to remove these obstructions?

Dying is hard—What can we do to make it easier? What are the next steps, practically, for us to take? Could we ever look forward to Death?

The Second Most Checked-out Library Book in San Francisco

January 18, 2015 / vsweet / General / 2 Comments

We were thrilled about this: http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2015/01/15/san-franciscos-most-commonly-checked-out-library-books/#photo-578782

GOD’S HOTEL attends Taiwan Awards ceremony

January 13, 2015 / vsweet / Featured / No Comments

When I heard from my editor 18 months ago that God’s Hotel was going to be translated into Traditional Chinese and published in Taiwan—I was thrilled. It was the first foreign country to translate and publish my work, and I was thrilled for that, but also because it meant I’d succeeded in making my experience as a doctor in a very unusual hospital in San Francisco California, compelling and important outside the United States, as well as inside it.Then I got the galleys, and what a beautiful edition! I love the care with which the book has been done, the cover especially, and I would like to thank the editor, Ms Baywen Chang and the translator Ms Cindy Hung for their incredible work at making God’s Hotel powerful and clear enough so that it could be selected as a Best Book for 2014.

GOD’S HOTEL is really thrilled. It loves awards.