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By Elaine Schattner, MD, on January 31st, 2011
 Maybe I’m the last person under 80 to have seen this clip from last Saturday night’s SNL intro, except that the demonstrations in Egypt were keeping some folks’ TV-eyes glued to other channels. This morning, while I was reading about the NY state budget with CNN droning in the background, the cable news broke with a bit on Jesse Eisenberg meeting Mark Zuckerberg on NBC’s stage elsewhere in Manhattan. I looked up and knew immediately I’d have easy lesson for the day.
Here’s the video, Jessie Eisenberg meets Mark Zuckerberg on SNL:
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Jesse Eisenberg “Monologue,” courtesy of NBC
Eisenberg is the actor who portrays Zuckerberg in the Social Network, a movie about Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook. It’s an emotionally complex bio-pic about a 26 year old man who’s alive and processing all of this information about his self as others perceive him, in real-time.
What’s medical in the SNL clip?
Well, Eisenberg says he already knows something
See more A Jewish Mother is Glad to See Eisenberg and Zuckerberg Getting Along on TV
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on January 30th, 2011
Today I came upon a Jan 24 op-ed, A Fighting Spirit Won’t Change Your Life by Richard Sloan, PhD, of Columbia University’s Psychiatry Department. Somehow I’d missed this worthwhile piece on the sometimes-trendy notion of mind-over-matter in healing and medicine.
Sloan opens with aftermath of the Tucson shootings:
…Representative Giffords’s husband describes her as a “fighter,” and no doubt she is one. Whether her recovery has anything to do with a fighting spirit, however, is another matter entirely.
He jumps quickly through a history of the mind cure movement in America: from Phineas Quimby’s concept of illness as a product of mistaken beliefs — to William James and New Thought ideas — to Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 Power of Positive Thinking — to more current takes on the matter. These ideas, while popular, are not reality-based.
In his words:
But there’s no evidence to back up the idea that an upbeat attitude can prevent any illness
See more A Note on Positive Thinking
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on January 28th, 2011
I have to admit that when I first read about the FDA’s report tying rare cases of anaplastic large cell lymphoma to breast implants, my mind raced with a strange blend of excitement, intense interest and concern. My thoughts shifted from “wow, that’s really interesting” to “exactly what did the FDA find” to “should I be worried?“
So I’ve decided to write this morning’s post from my perspective as an oncologist
See more An Oncologist Considers Rare Lymphomas in Women With Breast Implants
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on January 27th, 2011
 It’s a Pandora’s box, but one that needs be opened. The problem is that if we biopsy every abnormality – such as a minor thickening or fluid accumulation adjacent to a breast implant – we’ll hike up the costs and, more importantly, the complications associated: With every needle stick there’s a risk of infection, additional scar formation and more. On the other hand, you wouldn’t want to overlook a treatable, early-stage lymphoma. Women need to know of the risks of implants, which can only be determined if doctors thoroughly investigate these sorts of complications.
See more FDA Reports on Association of Breast Implants and a Rare Form of Lymphoma
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on January 26th, 2011
 The image of Brooklyn Decker, a real woman and model from Middletown OH, streamed through my Google news feed this morning. I have to admire any person named Brooklyn, the place where I was born.
From a post on my BlogHer health RSS:
Brooklyn Decker on the cover of Sports Illustrated, in 2010
The BlogHer subject is Decker’s diet and exercise secrets: “…no matter how wealthy or famous you are, Decker says the only thing that really works is exercise, eating healthy and accepting your body for what it is that will make you succeed.”
Got it.
Related Posts:After Breast Cancer, Get a Gym Membership!Do Adults Need Physicians to Tell Them to Exercise?Harsh Words, and Women’s Health at RiskWeds Web Shoutout: A Cardiologist’s Blog on Heart Health, Doctoring and FitnessKomen Update – Future Plans?
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on January 25th, 2011
Today’s Times reports on our nation’s students’ poor science test results. The results are bleak: only 34% of fourth graders scored at a “proficient” level or higher; just 30% of eight graders scored at a proficient level or higher; 21% of twelfth graders scored at a proficient or higher level in science.
The mega-analysis, prepared by the National Center for Education Statistics, derives from 2009 testing of 156,500 fourth-graders and 151,100 eighth-graders, with state-by-state and nationwide metrics of those, and of 11,100 twelfth-graders. Student scores were ranked at one of three science knowledge levels for each peer group: advanced, proficient and basic, as defined by the Department of Education. Only a tiny fraction — as few as 1 or 2% of students — attained “advanced” scores on the science exams.
The complete report card analyzes the data by race, sex, urban vs. rural districts, private vs. public schools and other factors, and includes
See more Sad Stats for Science Knowledge in U.S. Schools
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on January 24th, 2011
A few years ago I started writing a book on what it was like to be a cancer patient and an oncologist. This morning I came upon this section on second opinions:
Is it OK to get a second opinion?
Definitely. And there’s no need to be secretive about it, or to worry about hurting the doctor’s feelings. Second opinions are routine in fields like oncology, and are often covered by insurance. Be up-front: any decent oncologist can understand a cancer patient’s need to find a doctor who’s right for them, with whom they’re comfortable making important decisions. And in difficult cases, some specialists appreciate the chance to discuss the situation with another expert. So a second opinion can be beneficial to patients and physicians alike.
When things can get out of hand, though, is when patients start “doctor shopping.” For example, I’ve cared for some patients with leukemia who’ve been to see over 10 oncologists. If you’re
See more Why It’s a Good Idea to Get a Second Opinion, and Maybe a Third, But Rarely a Fourth
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on January 21st, 2011
 …for this Friday morning, I’ll just mention the perspective piece called Can Congress Make You Buy Broccoli? And Why That’s a Hard Question. Really I think the better question is whether or not the government can force people to eat broccoli.
And how could the NEJM authors have known about last night’s episode of the Office, that Michael would break HR rules by forcing Kevin to eat a stalk of raw broccoli…Kevin spat it out, forcefully and problematically for some viewers.
My tentative conclusion is that …
See more The Broccoli Connection
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on January 20th, 2011
 This morning’s news feed delivered some seemingly excellent news for some people with melanoma. At least until now, this form of skin cancer has been considered incurable when metastatic. In the last year, we heard details about the ups and downs of ongoing clinical trials of new drugs to treat the disease.
The Times reports that Roche’s experimental drug prolongs life in patients with metastatic melanoma whose tumors have B-Raf mutations. The new findings, based on a randomized phase III, open-label and industry-sponsored trial, BRIM 3, were first communicated in a press release yesterday. The company indicates that the study met its primary endpoints: Patients taking the experimental pill, RG7204, lived longer, and went longer without disease progression, than those patients in the control arm who received standard chemotherapy (dacarbazine) injections every three weeks.
The new drug – a pill usually given at a dose of 960 milligrams twice daily — goes by several names:
See more Cautious Optimism for a New Melanoma Treatment
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on January 19th, 2011
 I was listening to All Things Considered yesterday while preparing dinner. A short, interesting story came on: You Have An Accent Even On Twitter. The NPR host, Robert Siegel, interviewed Jacob Eisenstein, a post-doc at Carnegie Mellon who has been examining regional variances in Twitter usage.
Some highlighted examples of Twitter dialecticisms:
In New York, people tend to do “suttin” (i.e. something, and usually having nothing to do with Sutton Place)
The use of “hella” to mean “very” as in “I’m hella tired” is more commonly iterated by people who’ve lived in Northern California.
(LOL is universally understood.)
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I was sufficiently intrigued to track down Dr. Eisenstein’s paper, A Latent Variable Model for Geographical Lexical Variation, presented on January 8 at the annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America in Pittsburgh. It’s a technical article befitting an MIT graduate, with un-trendy headings like “Cascading Topic Models,” “Inference” and heavy math. Still, I enjoyed
See more Regional Dialects on Twitter, and Other Things You Gotta Know
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