KevinMD January 25, 2026
The number was specific: 18,000 steps.
It came from a retired hospital director in Taipei, a physician-administrator who spent four decades building services, negotiating budgets, and managing crises across a health care system that now treats an aging society as its primary patient.
Most physicians retire into silence. He retired into data.
But the more interesting revelation did not come from his smartwatch. It came from the dinner table.
A shift in governance
In Western narratives, physician retirement is framed as cessation, an ending of clinical labor. In Chinese culture, retirement is not cessation. It is transfer. It is the moment when governance shifts from institutions to bodies, from systems to selves, and from hospitals to tables.
This director did...
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