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.
The author has been concerned for a while that she might be addicted to blogging. Symptoms include wanting to post instead of working on a book proposal and other, likely more important projects. She was thinking of crowd-sourcing how best to describe this disposition, but it turns out the Internet already provides a diagnostic term: […]
A few days ago I read that Dr. Lazar Greenfield, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, resigned as the president-elect of the American College of Surgeons over flak for authoring a Valentine’s Day-pegged, tacky, tasteless and sexist piece in Surgery News. The February issue is mysteriously absent in the pdf-ied archives. According to the […]
The author learned a new word this weekend while attending the annual meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists in Philadelphia. In a richly-informative session on ethics of clinical trials, one of the speakers, Dr. Jason Karlawish – a bioethicist, geriatrician and Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, taught me a new term: […]
Today Ed Silverman of Pharmalot considers the case of a ghost-written medical text’s mysterious disappearance. The 1999 book, “Recognition and Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders: A Psychopharmacology Handbook for Primary Care,” (reviewed in a psychiatry journal here) came under scrutiny last fall when it became evident that the physician “authors” didn’t just receive money from a […]
This week a paper came out in JAMA showing a surprising reduction in breast cancer cases among women who had hysterectomies and then took Premarin, an estrogen-only remedy compounded from steroids in horses’ urine. The research merits attention because it’s part of the Women’s Health Initiative and is well-done by several measures: The study is […]
Yesterday I checked in on the Cancer Culture Chronicles, a thoughtful and sometimes funny blog by Anna Rachnel, who lives with metastatic breast cancer. There I learned that the author of Living With Cancer, a blog I’d read occasionally and has been in the back of my mind lately, is dead. Sadly, I never had […]
a poem for Wednesday: I was touched by this headline in yesterday’s news: Japan nuclear crisis may have a silver lining for radiation health research. Yeah, and cancer is a gift. — The wasabi is too hot, NPR shared yesterday, and I agree. This radiation story has a long half-life, whether we write on it […]
This week’s New Yorker cover pretty well sums up my thoughts lately. It’s a bleak, semi-natural image that blends art and science, offers brightness amidst darkness, and reminds us of how little most of us know about physics, nuclear energy and radioactivity. And it’s a strange, unsettling start for the Spring. — Related Posts:Considering the […]
The Times ran an intriguing experiment on its Well blog yesterday: a medical problem-solving contest. The challenge, based on the story of a real girl who lives near Philadelphia, drew 1379 posted comments and closed this morning with publication of the answer. Dr. Lisa Sanders, who moderated the piece, says today that the first submitted […]
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 […]
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 […]
Lupus, an autoimmune disease, turned up on the front page, right side of today’s Wall Street Journal. It cropped up, also, on the first page of the New York Times business section, and elsewhere. Scientific American published a nice on-line review, just now. The reason is that yesterday the FDA approved a new, monoclonal antibody […]
A new report was published on-line this afternoon by the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO). It covers a Phase III (randomized) clinical trial of Avastin (Bevacizumab) in women with metastatic BC. Over 1200 patients were included in the analysis, all with Her2 negative disease. The design of the randomized study protocol was a bit unusual, […]
