The Pong Principle

The Grand Prize Winner of Medical Economics’ Doctors’ Writing Contest is a charming story about the advice a 70-year-old patient gave to a doctor with four children: Buy a Ping Pong table. It changed many things in the physician’s family.

I was reminded of the Ping Pong table upstairs in one of the barns at my family farm, where all my cousins and I would hang out for hours to play and talk. It was the perfect place to go on rainy days and buggy nights.

The prize-winning story made me realize we should have had a Ping Pong table when our children were young, too.

Doctors’ Writing Contest 2011 Grand Prize Winner: The Pong Principle – Learning to listen: A patient becomes the teacher by serving up life-changing advice – ModernMedicine.