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 doctors are just thinking, and not being the ones to call you back, or putting in intravenous catheters, or even just sitting and taking a thorough history – they’ll know you less well. And if they spend less time with you, a patient with a serious illness, they ….
The point is – it’s not all about the vacations in Thailand, birthdays and rock concerts. Or opera, if you’re into that. Rather, it’s the everyday stuff that fills our lives.
With many difficult situations, the first step in solving a problem is in acknowledging it exists. After that, you can understand it and, hopefully, fix it. Our health care system now, as it functions in most academic medical centers and dollar-strapped hospitals, doesn’t give doctors much of a break, or slack, or “joy,” as…
This kind of paternalism, when a doctor assesses the risks and benefits, and spares the patient’s “knowing” seems anachronistic. But it may, still, be what many people are looking for when and if they get a serious illness. Not everyone wants a “tell me everything” kind of physician.
When I was a resident I worked in a general medicine clinic. One afternoon each week, I’d get more dressed than usual and split off from my inpatient team around noon to go see patients in another building, outside of the hospital. Today, I’m reminded of a man I saw there and treated for two […]
A broken arm, a low-stage breast cancer that’s treated and done with, a bout of pneumonia – these are things that a career can afford, an editor can handle, friends can be supportive. But when you have one thing, and then another, and then another, it gets scary, it weighs you down.
The movie, based in part on the true story of scriptwriter Will Reiser, surprised me by its candor. Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt smoothly portrays Adam Lerner, who soon finds out he has cancer. The opening scene
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.
Yesterday morning, two women who were active in the on-line breast cancer community died. Rachel Cheetham Moro (1970 – 2012) was a critical thinker who vigorously supported BCAction and the NBCC’s 2020 deadline. She was a generous and thoughtful on-line friend to many women in the metastatic and more general BC community, where she used the handle @ccchronicles. Her […]
Over the weekend I developed another bout of diverticulitis. Did the usual: fluids, antibiotics, rest, avoided going to the ER, cancelled travel plans. One of my doctors asked a very simple question: is this happening more frequently? The answer, we both knew, was yes. But I don’t have a Personal Health Record (PHR) that in […]
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 […]
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 few days ago I had a colonoscopy to evaluate some gastrointestinal problems. Subjective summary: Yuck. Downing 3 liters of Nu-Litely, a hyper-osmotic colonic cocktail prep, does not make for a pleasant Sunday afternoon, evening or night. As for the procedure itself, I don’t know how Katie Couric did it on TV. But what made the […]
Today marks 9 years, exactly, since Dr. L. gave me the Call. It was a Wednesday afternoon. I was in clinic, caring for patients with blood diseases. In between seeing my patients and supervising the residents and fellows, I checked my voice mail. The message from Dr. L. said I should please contact her. Already, by […]
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 […]
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 […]
They were impatient with the pace of research and physicians’ protocols, and spoke out emphatically about their needs: for more research; for prevention and treatment; for easier access to new drugs; and, simply, for good medical care.
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 boasts. “When I took my board exams in 1987, female doctors were still uncommon, and we […]
When I was a medical resident in the late 1980s, we treated some patients with pancreatic cancer on a regimen nick-named the coffee protocol because it included infusions of intravenous caffeine. How absurd, we thought back then, because years earlier caffeine had been linked to pancreatic cancer as a possible cause. Now, two new studies […]
Dr. Wes has a short post today, How to Optimize Your Care While Hospitalized that got me thinking. He writes: …A lone doctor listening to some highly experienced and capable nurses, reflecting on their work: “If the patient’s nice, it’s a lot easier to want to go back in that room with them. Their reputation […]
