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.
This morning’s news feed delivered some seemingly excellent news for some people with melanoma. At least until now, this form of skin cancer has been considered incurable when metastatic. In the last year, we heard details about the ups and downs of ongoing clinical trials of new drugs to treat the disease. The Times reports […]
The big health story of the week, headlining the business news, is that Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder and usual CEO, is taking another medical leave. This is hardly a surprising development, given that the 55 year old corporate leader has had a complex medical course since at least 2003. In August, 2004 he told Apple […]
I wish that more physicians would speak out in favor of stricter gun control laws. Firearms present a public health issue in the U.S. According to the CDC, over 12,000 Americans die each year from homicide involving firearms. The number of non-fatal gunshot wounds requiring hospital care approximates 48,000 per year.
So many others have written on Wakefield’s fraud, and considered the role of the press in perpetuating the notion that vaccines cause autism, I wasn’t going to cover it here on ML. But I do think there are a few instructive points from this “lesson” about medical communication and news:
1. People aren’t always rational in their decisions about health care. (This is an understatement.)
The Obama administration will cut a new Medicare provision to compensate providers for discussing end-of-life care, according to the New York Times. This is an unfortunate reversal. Too-often, doctors fail to have these discussions with their patients. This happens for many reasons including some physicians’ discomfort with the topic, their not wanting to diminish patients’ […]
The findings show that it’s safe for women who’ve had breast cancer surgery to work out in a way that includes a careful, progressive upper body strengthening. Weight lifting is not only safe; it can reduce lymphedema in women at risk. But “old wives’ tales” still persist in some doctors’ minds and established medical resources. These need be dispelled.
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 finding have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims […]
Dear Readers, I am sad to learn of the death of Elizabeth Edwards, who died earlier today of metastatic breast cancer at the age of 61. She has taught countless people about what it’s like to live with cancer. My thoughts are with her family now. -ES Related Posts:No Related Posts
On the hematology front – Last weekend at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH), researchers presented data on a new kind of blood thinner. Rivaroxaban (Xarelto) is a pill that works by blocking the activated form of human clotting factor X (Xa). The NEJM published the EINSTEIN* findings on-line ahead of […]
I’ll be staying near my home in Manhattan this week. But if I did have plans to travel by airplane for the holiday, I think I’d be apprehensive about the new screening procedures implemented by the Transportation Safety Authority (TSA).
My concern is not so much with the scanners…Rather, I’m worried about screening errors – false positive and false negative results, and about harms – physical and/or emotional, that patients and people with disability may experience during the screening process.
I’m a bit puzzled by all the excitement about Merck’s new drug, Anacetrapib (MK-0859), that’s said to lower risk for cardiovascular disease by lowering bad cholesterol. Earlier this week at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association, researchers presented promising findings on the drug, including results from the phase III DEFINE trial. The list of disclosures for that abstract is long and fairly shocking. On Wednesday, the results were published on-line in the NEJM.*
The new drug interests me, as an oncologist, because it’s an enzyme inhibitor …
I was saddened yesterday to learn of the death of Jill Clayburgh. The 66 year old actress died on Friday in her Connecticut home. According to ABC news and the LA Times among other reports, she’d had chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) for 21 years. This means she lived with CLL for nearly a third of […]
Today’s Annals of Internal Medicine includes new results for the CLOTS (Clots in Legs Or sTockings after Stroke) Trial. Not-quite acronyms aside, it’s an interesting study with implications for many patients at risk for deep venous thrombosis (DVT). This U.K.-based study, involving 3114 patients in 112 hospitals in 9 countries, used ultrasound to evaluate possible […]
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. Snow died at the age of 45, of what was said to be apoplexy, old jargon for a stroke.
In 2009, there were 221,226 cholera cases reported and 4,946 cholera deaths in 45 countries, according to the CDC. Based on information put together by the World Health Organization,
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…
The amazing and nearly-too-good-to-be true news is that a top-notch team of engineers, doctors including the NASA/Johnson Space Center Deputy
Over 400 Nigerian children have died from lead poisoning this year…lead poisoning is sometimes called plumbism, stemming from plumbum, the Latin term for lead (Pb, atomic number 82), a metal used by plumber. A rarer term is Saturnism, based on the metal’s association with that planet and ancient Roman god.
The Swedish study with its positive findings should be scrutinized, yes, but no more or less than the other papers on the same subject that have been highlighted, selectively, in the media. How journalists cover mammography studies, and that they do so with an open mind, matters a lot.
I’d say the opposite is true: It’s precisely because there are effective treatments for early-stage disease that it’s worth finding breast cancer early. Otherwise, what would be the point?
Metastatic breast cancer is quite costly to treat and, even with some available targeted therapies, remains
A question central to today’s discussion – which does at least acknowledge the decline in breast cancer mortality – is the extent to which mammography is responsible for this trend, as opposed to other factors such as increased awareness about cancer, better cancer treatments and other variables.
In some ways this seems like a pro-active, well-intentioned policy that could save lives. On the other hand, as discussed in the NEJM piece, the new screening policy raises a host of challenging issues:
* how will colleges inform minor players’ parents about results?
* how will the schools handle players’ privacy?…
