The Checklist That Tells the Surgeon to Ask for Help | Dr. Robert Cho

Dr. Robert Cho operates on children's spines with Pearl Jam playing. When the monitors show the electrical signals between a child's brain and spinal cord starting to drop, the first thing that happens is not medical. The music goes off. That is the signal to everyone in the room that a checklist is coming, read out loud, together, off the wall. And one of the steps on that checklist is for Cho, the most senior person present, to pick up a phone and admit he needs help. Cho is an orthopedic spine surgeon with offices in Beverly Hills and Brentwood who has done over a thousand scoliosis surgeries on kids and adults. His argument to Pia Arthur and Kelly Cheeseman is that calm under pressure is not a personality trait, it is something you script in advance, and that trust works the same way. He reads the t-shirt before he reads the chart. He gives every patient his cell phone number. He opens every operation by telling the room that anyone can stop him at any point, because he knows the story of the copilot who could not bring himself to tell the pilot they were flying into a mountain. In this episode:• Why the phone-a-friend step is the most valuable part of the checklist, and what an outside voice with a low heart rate can see that the room cannot• The ego burden of asking for help, and how putting it on paper removes it• Reading the t-shirt: earning a child's trust in the few moments you get• Why most patients he sees never get operated on, and how telling them so builds trust• The surgeon who threw a scalpel into the wall, and what that does to everyone else in the room• What actually happens in a parent's head the second they hear the word surgery• The one word he thinks should be banned from every doctor-patient relationship• Why a confidently wrong AI reminds him of an old-guard surgeon• What "well said" means in an operating room, and the pet peeve about reading the scan firstTimestamps:00:00 Intro01:40 Welcome to Well Said02:14 What a pediatric spine surgeon actually does04:45 Getting the call from the OR in the middle of the day07:39 The Alec Baldwin scene in Malice, and the surgeon god complex09:32 What surgeons can learn from pilots11:43 Projecting calm as a leader15:13 The environment you create in the room15:49 Earning a child's trust in the few moments you get17:44 Why he doesn't sell surgery20:16 Go home and think about it20:44 What happens in a parent's head the second they hear surgery21:56 The patient who saw seven surgeons before him25:48 Why a confidently wrong AI reminds him of an old-guard surgeon28:46 The note-taking tool that saves him two hours a day30:16 Self-driving cars, robots, and what's next in the OR31:26 The most accurate medical show on TV35:42 How he tells a parent their child needs surgery39:43 The demands on doctors, and why patients deserve more42:54 What a scared patient needs from your first sentence Subscribe to Well Said for new conversations on connection as a human skill. Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.