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.
One of the things I liked best about practicing medicine is that I was constantly learning.
Making rounds at seven in the morning on an oncology floor would be a chore if you didn’t get to examine and think and figure out what’s happening to a man with leukemia whose platelets are dangerously low, or whose lymphoma is responding to treatment but can’t take anymore medicine because of an intense, burn-like rash. You’d have to look stuff up, sort among clues
The risks and costs of breast cancer screening are exaggerated and misrepresented in the recent news…. My conclusion is that rather than ditching a life-saving procedure that’s imperfect, we should make sure that all doctors and radiology facilities are up to snuff.
We need to distinguish between errors in the measurement (cancer or not) and errors in decisions that we – patients and doctors – make after upon detecting a premalignant or early-stage malignancy in a woman’s breast.