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.
Today’s breaking breast cancer news is on Avastin. The FDA has just announced, formally, that it will rescind approval for the drug’s use in people with metastatic breast cancer. Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg writes this her statement: I know I speak on behalf of the many physicians that have been involved with this issue here […]
Today’s ML comes straight from the Oval Office. President Obama talks about smoking, and how hard it is to stop, and what can be done to reduce the use and long-term health consequences of tobacco. What I like about this Presidential health advisory: He credits the ACS, which is sponsoring a smokeout today. He’s clear about […]
Yours truly, the author of Medical Lessons, is listening to music while she writes. A live version of the Stones’ “Silver Train” has just come on, and she’s happily reminded of something that happened 30 years ago. Distracting? Yes. Calming? Yes. Paradoxically helps to keep me on track? Yes. My iPod keeps my mind from […]
A funny thing happened at my doctor’s appointment on Friday. I checked in, and after confirming that my address and insurance hadn’t changed since last year, waited for approximately 10 minutes. A worker of some sort, likely a med-tech, called me to “take my vitals.” She took my blood pressure with a cuff that made […]
Yesterday’s Washington Post Sports has a clip from CNN, 20 years ago, when basketball star Magic Johnson announced on TV that he had HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The date was Nov 7, 1991. “Where were you when Magic made his announcement? What were your thoughts on Johnson and HIV/AIDS that day and how […]
Few BC news items irk some women I know more than those linking alcohol consumption to the Disease. Joy-draining results like those reported this week serve up a double-whammy of guilt: first – that you might have developed cancer because you drank a bit, or a lot, or however much defines more than you should have imbibed; and second – now that […]
A curious diagram appeared in the most recent NEJM, in a perspective on U.S. dietary guidelines. It’s a USDA food wheel from the early 1940s. With Twitter-like style, it says: “For Health…eat some food from each group…every day! The details are rich: “butter and fortified margarine” constitute 1of the 7 groups. Further inspection-worthy, IMO. — Related […]
Something I learned at the MBCN conference is that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA, a.k.a. HCR), will require that private insurance companies cover the routine costs of medical care for patients participating in approved clinical trials. Medicare does so already, said Dr. Tatiana Prowell, an oncologist on the Johns Hopkins […]
Some of the more understandable discussion comes from women with metastatic disease whose tumors were missed by screening mammography. Notably, neither paper quotes an oncologist.
An article appeared in yesterday’s NYT Magazine on the hazards of over-confidence. The Israeli-born psychologist (and epistemologist, I’d dare say), Nobel laureate and author Daniel Kahneman considers how people make decisions based on bits of information that don’t provide an adequate representation of the subject at hand. He recounts how poorly, and firmly, army officers evaluate […]
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 routine PSA testing prolongs men’s lives, and second, that PSA evaluation may, on balance, cause […]
A metastasis refers to a lump of cancer cells that’s physically separated from the original tumor. A metastasis can be local, like when colon cancer spreads to a nearby lymph node in the gut, or distant, as when lung cancer cells generate tumors in the adrenal gland, liver, bone or brain. Sometimes metastases cause serious […]
More, a magazine “for women of style & substance,” has an unusually thorough, now-available article by Nancy F. Smith in its September issue on A Breast Cancer You May Not Need to Treat. The article’s subject is DCIS (Ductal Carcinoma in Situ). This non-invasive, “Stage O” malignancy of the breast has shot up in reported incidence […]
Last week a video came my way via ZDoggMD, a popular blog by doctors who are not me. The Office Med School Edition — The clip is a parody of The Office about Problem Based Learning (PBL). In a typical PBL, the students meet regularly in small groups. On Monday they begin with clinical aspects of a case. The […]
Today I visited my internist for a checkup and flu shot. We talked about how I’m doing, and she examined me, and we discussed what procedures I ought have done and not done. She’s been my doctor since the summer of 1987, when I was an intern at the hospital. We reviewed so much that […]
A post in yesterday’s Well column, about coverage of breast cancer by the media, focused on the first-person narrative of NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Journalist Tara Parker-Pope writes: Her announcement has generated much discussion in the blogosphere, including an analysis by Gary Schwitzer, publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, who writes that Ms. Mitchell made some missteps in discussing her […]
Watching the Big C feels like a chore lately. It reminds me of the feeling I used to get when I had to see and examine a patient in the hospital, under my care for some administrative non-reason, who didn’t need to be in the hospital IMO, and whose hospital presence took time my time […]
Dear Readers, ML will take a blogging break through Labor Day. I hope the storm doesn’t cause too much damage. Stay safe, wherever you are, and enjoy these end-of-summer days! – ES —- Related Posts:Reading LisaTalking About Physician Burnout, and Changing the SystemGive Doctors a BreakSome Articles I Authored A While AgoSteve Jobs Takes a Medical […]
Yesterday morning I wrote a short post on CelebrityDiagnosis.com. By evening, news broke that Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs resigned from his position, presumably for reasons of his health. What’s public, by Jobs’ decision, is that he had a relatively good, typically slow-growing kind of malignancy in the pancreas, a neuroendocrine islet cell tumor. He informed […]
Late Friday afternoon, the FDA announced its approval, upon accelerated review, of a new drug, Adcetris (brentuximab) for patients with Hodgkin’s lymphoma that has relapsed after bone marrow transplant and for some patients with T-cell anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL). This interests me for a lot of reasons, among them that I used to work in the field of lymphoma immunology […]
