Dr. Elaine Schattner's notes on becoming educated as a patient
Dr. Elaine Schattner's notes on becoming educated as a patient
© Elaine Schattner, 2009, 2022 By : Template Sell.
If you’re thinking of participating in a clinical trial for cancer or any other medical condition, a good place to find out about the research is ClinicalTrials.gov. The site, sponsored by the NIH, NLM and FDA, is one outcome of the FDA Modernization Act (FDAMA) of 1997. The database aims to provide information on clinical […]
This morning health business mavens are chirping with bright results for ipilimumab, a monoclonal antibody that can extend life in people with metastatic melanoma. If the new data – which I haven’t seen – are true, it’s good news for patients. In 2010, melanoma affected 68,000 people in the U.S. and led to death in […]
I first heard about quinoa a few years ago, when food-sellers started marketing the stuff as a cereal-like, cholesterol-lowering nutritious substance. It’s from the Andes, I knew, and comes in some varieties. If you purchase the raw stuff or receive a gift, say, from a Peruvian person who knows her quinoa, you’ll find quickly that […]
Today’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine includes an article with the bland title Cytarabine Dose for Acute Myeloid Leukemia. AML is an often-curable form of leukemia characterized by rapidly-growing myeloid white blood cells. Cytarabine – what we’d call “Ara-C” on rounds – has been a mainstay of AML treatment for decades. The […]
The situation in Japan remains grim. I can’t reasonably report on this, except to say what’s evident by the photographs, videos and usually-reliable sources: a second reactor may have ruptured. There’s been another burst of radioactivity into the air. Meanwhile, thousands of bodies are being discovered in the post-Tsunami landscape along the northeast coast. The […]
Listening to and watching the news, last night and this morning, I’ve heard all kinds of stuff – mainly from reporters who don’t seem to know very much about physics or radiation. (Personal kudos to Anderson Cooper, who seems to have a broader command of the terms and handle on the situation than some of […]
Here is a partial list of agencies helping to provide assistance and relief to the people of Japan during this emergency: Save the Children Doctors Without Borders The American Red Cross* United Jewish Appeal Japan Earthquake Relief Fund You may have your own favorite charity, which of course may be the best way for you […]
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 evening before the recent quake and tsunami, Sontag […]
I find it hard to think much about anything besides the earthquake and devastation in northeast Japan. It’s a place I’ve never been. I don’t speak the language. In trying to learn something from this, it makes sense to review what to do in case of a nuclear disaster, the kind of thing that should […]
Last night I began reading a long essay, Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag. The work dates to 1993, and centers on the power of photographs of war. She considers Virginia Woolf’s earlier reflections on horrific images from the Spanish Civil War, in Three Guineas. Sontag writes: “Not to be pained by these […]
