Counterfeit Drugs, A New Concern for Patients

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.

Oh, No Methotrexate!

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.

New Music from an Orchestra of Radioactive Isotopes

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….

3 Differences between Prostate and Breast Cancer Screening

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…

Notes on Kris Carr and Crazy Sexy Cancer

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…

Give Doctors a Break

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…

Get Off My Case

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…

Live-Blogging a Book, and the Earthquake

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…

May I Call You ‘Doctor’?

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,…

Why the Term ‘Patient’ Is So Important in Health Care

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.

On a Velázquez Portrait, and the Value of Expertise

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….

Lessons from the Wakefield Case

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…

After Breast Cancer, Get a Gym Membership!

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,…

The U-Shaped Curve of Happiness

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…

Science Takes a Double Hit in the Press, Maybe

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…

The Cost of Room Service and Other Hospital Amenities

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…

A Video About a Patient Who Might Have Too Much Information

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…

A Play About the Life and Work of Dr. Rosalind Franklin

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…

No Quick Fix

“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…

Notes on Cholera, Old and New

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.

No More Clipboards

“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…

Another Take On An Ordinary Day

…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: