Reader Feedback (Letter to the Editor‪)‬

Dear Editor: I enjoyed reading Leland Kaiser's article, "The Physician Executive in a Changing World" (March/April 1999) very much. ft is both uplifting and full of wonderfully true vision. I am a practicing medical oncologist and also help lead a web company. Dr. Kaiser's words apply equally well to both worlds. His touching on the answers to be found in physics was particularly meaningful. I have been spending a lot of time reading about chaos and complexity lately. Some of the models of transformation in nature, such as the discoveries of the chemist Ilya Prigogine, apply so well to the current state of health care and the lot of us physicians--he found that compounds are constantly bombarded by events that test their stability. At times, these compounds break apart and assume disorganized chaotic states (this is where we are in medicine today). However, beyond the chaos, these compounds reform into new and even more complex structures, This is a natural process that perhaps we are also experiencing in health care. Dr. Kaiser's article does a wonderfully eloquent job of expressing many of these themes.