writer, health care advocate, physician
A journalist who covers medical matters of the heart grabbed my attention on the Fourth of July. In The Voice of the Patient: Time To Bring Out the Muzzle?, Larry Husten at Forbes’ Cardiobrief blog, insinuates that the women who spoke at the…
In this new climate of shame, it’s easy to imagine a girl might feel really, really bad about herself simply for being sexually active.
Counterfeit vials were sold and distributed to more than a dozen offices and medical treatment facilities in the U.S. This event, which seems to have affected a small number of patients and practices, should sound a big alarm.
Methotrexate has been used in cancer wards for over 50 years. And like other beyond-patent meds, it’s become less profitable to manufacture MTX compared to much costlier new agents.
Earlier this month, the ACS released its annual report on Cancer Facts and Figures. The document, based largely on analyses of SEER data from the NCI, supports that approximately 229,000 adults in the U.S. will receive a diagnosis of invasive…
Earlier this month the IOM issued a big report on breast cancer and the environment. The thick analysis, commissioned and sponsored by the Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, was authored by an expert panel. Their task – to assess all available…
For the weekend – A tweet led me to a fantastically inventive kind of music. The Radioactive Orchestra comprises 3175 radioisotopes. From the website: “Melodies are created by simulating what happens in the atomic nucleus when it decays from its….
Days ago, the USPSTF issued a new draft for its recommendations on routine PSA measurements in asymptomatic men. The panel’s report is published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The main findings are two: first, the absence of evidence that…
I’m half-tempted to put down yesterday’s new NYT Magazine feature on crazy sexy cancer goddess Kris Carr. Her blog was one of the first I found when I started ML, and it was the most popular link on my fledgling site until I pulled it, fearful of…
They were impatient with the pace of research and physicians’ protocols, and spoke out emphatically about their needs: for more research; for prevention and treatment; for easier access to new drugs; and, simply, for ood medical care.
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Don Berwick speak at the annual meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists. Berwick now heads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. When he spoke in April, on transparency and…
In a heartless op-ed in yesterday’s paper, an anesthesiologist argues that medicine shouldn’t be a part-time endeavor. Dr. Sibert makes a firm introduction: “I’m a doctor and a mother of four, and I’ve always practiced medicine full time,” she…
In my inbox this morning, via ASCO‘s “Cancer in the News” feed: The UK’s Telegraph (5/6, Beckford) reported that as “many as 20,000 British women could avoid developing” breast cancer “each year, if they took more exercise, drank less and ate…
An article in the March 24 NEJM called Specialization, Subspecialization, and Subsubspecialization in Internal Medicine might have some heads shaking: Isn’t there a shortage of primary care physicians?
I don’t know if makes sense to blog on a book by a woman who’s dead, who wrote about photographs and the news. But new media allows us to try new things, unedited. Here goes: In Regarding the Pain of Others, which I began, unknowingly, on the…
Last week I considered the relationship between the Prince Albert and his speech therapist in The King’s Speech. One aspect I wanted to explore further is why the future king initially insisted on calling the practitioner “doctor.” In real life,…
A while back, a first-year med student asked me if I think physicians should wear white coats. There’s a debate about it, she mentioned.
A few years ago I started writing a book on what it was like to be a cancer patient and an oncologist. This morning I came upon this section on second opinions: Is it OK to get a second opinion?
I wish that more physicians would speak out in favor of stricter gun control laws.
Providing health care is or should be unlike other commercial transactions. The doctor, or other person who gives medical treatment, has a special professional and moral obligation to help the person who’s receiving his or her care.
This is an unusual entry into a discussion on the limits of patient empowerment. In late December the Times ran a story, beginning on its front page, about a portrait in the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Diego Velázquez, the 17th Century Spanish….
I was almost at a loss for words today, besides having read the morning paper on the upcoming ESP study in a major psychology journal with questionable stats, and my having seen last night the first story on the British Medical Journal‘s report…
Earlier this month the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA) published a myth-busting paper on weight lifting for women at risk for lymphedema after breast cancer treatment. The study was neither large (154 patients at max,…
This evening, after I finished cleaning up the kitchen after our family dinner, I glanced at the current issue of the Economist. The cover features this headline: the Joy of Growing Old (or why life begins at 46). It’s a light read, as this…
In his latest New Yorker piece The Truth Wears Off, Jonah Lehrer directs our attention to the lack of reproducibility of results in scientific research. The problem is pervasive, he says: …now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed…
A perspective in this week’s NEJM considers the Emerging Importance of Patient Amenities in Patient Care. The trend is that more hospitals lure patients with hotel-like amenities: room service, magnificent views, massage therapy, family rooms and…
The skit depicts the interaction between a young man with a rash and his older physician. The patient is an informed kind of guy – he’s checked his own medical record on the doctor’s website, read up on rashes in the Boston Globe, checked pix on WebMD…
Franklin’s story starts like this: She was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in London. She excelled in math and science. She studied physical chemistry at Cambridge, where she received her undergraduate degree in 1941. After performing research in…
“If it’s chafed, put some lotion on it.” – some practical advice, offered by the character portraying Andrew Jackson, speaking toward the audience in the last scene of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a play written and directed by Alex Timbers…
Dr. John Snow, an anesthesiologist and founder of public health, recognized the mode of cholera’s spread more than 150 years ago in London, where he became famous for mandating the closure of the Broad Street Pump.
The 33 Chilean miners – mainly middle-aged and of modest means – zoomed up in high-tech capsules from the deep, would-be tomb where they’d been waiting for 69 days underground.
Expertise can make a huge difference in clinical outcomes.
It’s precisely because there are effective treatments for early-stage disease that it’s worth finding breast cancer early.
“This kind of aid to decisions, spread across tens of thousands of decisions every day, leads to much, much lower costs with no intrusion on clinical autonomy” – David Blumenthal, M.D., M.P.P., National Coordinator for Health Information…
…Live Each Day Like There’s a Lot of Them Left….What she articulated is the idea that maybe the best thing to do after cancer is to live, essentially, as you would do otherwise, except with a bit of added balance:
