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 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. Anatomy | Communication | Empowered Patient | Future of Medicine | Health IT | Medical Education | Wednesday Web Sighting
 This morning I toured Google’s new Body Browser. The trip wasn’t as easy as I’d envisioned; I got sidetracked on my way, having to update my Web browser before entering. The site requires an advanced Web browser, like Chrome beta or Firefox 4.0, to accommodate 3-D graphics. Update accomplished, I forged into Google-woman’s frame. (There is no man available, as yet.) See more First Inspection of Google’s Anatomy  Dear Readers, A few days ago I traveled with my family to Charleston, South Carolina. It was my first time in that peninsular city. The place is a hotbed of tourism – stuffed with establishments of fine cuisine, art galleries and architectural landmarks. Church Street, Charleston NC We enjoyed the visit. I swam laps daily. I brushed up on U.S. Revolutionary and Civil War history. I made a serious dent in a book I’m reading about Cleopatra. What I missed was the Internet, from which I was unintentionally disconnected for a few days. Surely some might think, or even tell me directly, that a digital break is a good thing. It’s healthy to step away from it, for sure. But it didn’t feel that way – I enjoy these bits of writing. I’m glad to be back at home, and on-line. - ES Related Posts:No See more Return from Charleston Regular readers of this blog know that I’m not into rants. Complaining is rarely constructive, I know. But I spent the afternoon sorting through a 2-month stack of medical bills and correspondences related to those. Despite the fact that I consistently pay bills on time, we received threatening notices from local hospitals for payments they deemed late. Three instances of avoidable hassle: …read more Related Posts: This evening, after I finished cleaning up the kitchen after our family dinner, I glanced at the current issue of the Economist. The cover features this headline: the Joy of Growing Old (or why life begins at 46). It’s a light read, as this so-influential magazine goes, but nice to contemplate if you’re, say, 50 years old and are wondering about your future. The article’s thesis is this: Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks — they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing… See more The U-Shaped Curve of Happiness 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 that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread… The Decline Effect, as Lehrer calls it, refers to scientists’ inability to reproduce reported results. The problem isn’t simple: it’s not just that different investigators or teams come up with conflicting information, or interpret the same raw data in disparate ways; over time, a single scientist may not be able to reproduce his or her own observations. (and to Other Physicians, Division Chiefs, Hospital Administrators and Everyone Else With Responsibilities for Other Humans): Yesterday I started but didn’t complete a post on the interesting concept of the Decline Effect. I got caught up with several extra-ML responsibilities that kept me busy until very late last night, which became morning before I knew it. I sensed my tiredness, and delayed that short essay for fear of writing something erroneous on the Internet. Today I had to get up extra early for a meeting. My mind wandered, and I contemplated my fatigue. I realized that I used to feel like this often when I was practicing, and especially when I returned to work after my cancer treatments and major back surgery. On nights and weekends, working as an attending hematologist and oncologist and caring for patients who were critically sick, I would get called constantly and, not infrequently, have to go to the hospital at odd hours. The work was  We learned this week that singer Aretha Franklin has pancreatic cancer. The 68 year old, Memphis-born Queen of Soul was hospitalized and underwent surgery last week, according to several reports. It’s sad news, in a week that was already sufficient in that dimension. According to the American Cancer Society, there are 43,000 new cases of pancreatic cancer per year in the U.S. Pancreatic cancer tends to occur in the elderly and is slightly more common in men than in women. Cigarette smoking is one of the few certain disposing factors; the causes are largely unknown. There’s a cardinal triad* I once learned for this disease: weight loss, abdominal pain and jaundice. These symptoms arise due to local effects of having a mass in the pancreas, which rests in the upper, back part of the abdominal cavity. The pancreas sits roughly between, and slightly behind, the stomach and liver, near to the bile duct. See more Listening to Aretha The word of the week appears on the front page of today’s New York Times in an article on a crowd-sourced response to WikiLeaks: “the Internet assaults underlined the growing reach of self-described “cyberanarchists,” antigovernment and anticorporate activists who have made an icon of Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian.” You won’t find a cyberanarchist reference in my old copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. A search led me to a 1998 Chicago Law Review article considering the “fundamental question of whether the state can regulate cyberspace at all.” Another hit led me to a site called cyberanarchy.org, which I don’t recommend to my readers unless you’re really, really into repetitive heavy metal with uninterpretable words set to a screen-filling red anarchism “A” symbol comprised of tiny flickering 0’s and 1’s. The origins of the compound word are a bit interesting. According to the on-line edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: Cyber is a new prefix: “of, relating to, or involving computers |
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