A bang-on article about superstition amongst the medical staff:

“Every doctor is either a black cloud or a white cloud,” said Ponsky, 33, a pediatric surgery fellow at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. “I am a black cloud. When I’m on call, things are incredibly busy. Crazy things happen.”

As unscientific as it sounds, the “cloud theory” is an almost universally known superstition in hospitals, part of a web of widely accepted beliefs and rituals that heavily influence doctors’ behavior, conversations and general outlook when they are on call . . .

. . . One physician at NYU Medical Center in New York, for example, believes he cannot perform a routine cardiac procedure without listening to a certain selection of songs in a specific order, according to Michael Postow, a third-year NYU medical student at the hospital. In addition, Postow said, the physician arranges all of the contents of his pockets the exact same way before every procedure.

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Tagged as: health reform, hospital, surgery