- With Mayo Clinic oncologist
Edward T. Creagan, M.D.
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Edward T. Creagan, M.D.
Edward Creagan, M.D.
"The magic of the electronic village is transforming health information. The mouse and keyboard have extended the stethoscope to the 500 million people now online." — Dr. Edward Creagan
The power of the medium inspires Dr. Edward Creagan as he searches for ways to share Mayo Clinic's vast resources with the general public.
Dr. Creagan, a Newark, N.J., native, is board certified in internal medicine, medical oncology, and hospice medicine and palliative care. He has been with Mayo Clinic since 1973 and in 1999 was president of the staff of Mayo Clinic.
Dr. Creagan, a professor of medical oncology at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, was honored in 1995 with the John and Roma Rouse Professor of Humanism in Medicine Award and in 1992 with the Distinguished Mayo Clinician Award, Mayo's highest recognition. He has been recognized with the American Cancer Society Professorship of Clinical Oncology.
He describes his areas of special interest as "wellness as a bio-psycho-social-spiritual-financial model" and fitness, mind-body connection, aging and burnout.
Dr. Creagan has been an associate medical editor with Mayo Clinic's health information websites and has edited publications and CD-ROMs and reviewed articles.
"We the team of (the website) provide reliable, easy-to-understand health and wellness information so that each of us can have productive, meaningful lives," he says.
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Stress blog
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Jan. 29, 2010
Hitting the wall can be a wake-up call
By Edward T. Creagan, M.D.
Sometimes we learn best from learning the hard way. Let me explain. Over the past nine months, a colleague and I have been putting together a new curriculum. The project is approximately 85 percent complete — we expected to connect the dots and submit the final for approval in short order.
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But we just couldn't seem to wrap up the project. It felt like we'd hit a wall. We began to wonder if the project was flawed and that was why we couldn't finish it. It gradually dawned on us, however, that the problem was us. Neither one of us was functioning at an optimal level because of jet lag.
Most experts estimate that it takes 1.5 days of recovery for every time zone covered. My colleague had just returned from a two-week educational program in Southeast Asia. I had just returned from a speaking engagement in Ireland. Since there are 12 time zones between Southeast Asia and Minnesota, my colleague needed approximately 18 days to fully recover, and it would take me eight or nine days to be back in top form.
We're reasonably intelligent people, yet we completely underestimated our ability to bounce back. So what's the important lesson for us? We have to recognize that we have limits. Ignoring them has consequences for us, for others and for our work.
The other lesson here for me is that I learn the most from my mistakes — I almost never learn from my successes. Can anyone else relate to this story?
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