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.
This week the NIH launched a new website, NIH Clinical Research Trials and You. In a Feb 6 press release, NIH Director Dr. Francis S. Collins said “The ability to recruit the necessary number of volunteers is vital to carrying out clinical research.” The idea behind the website is to help patients understand how clinical research […]
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 […]
All of this meshes with my experience – knowing women who’ve had breast-conserving surgery and then got mixed information about the results and what to do next. You’d think lumpectomy would be a standard procedure by now, and that decisions about what to do after the procedure, surgically speaking (let alone decisions about chemo, hormonal treatments and radiation) would be straightforward in most cases.
Yesterday the AMA news informed me that cyberchondria is on the rise. So it’s a good moment to consider the term’s meaning and history. Cyberchondria is an unfounded health concern that develops upon searching the Internet for information about symptoms or a disease. A cyberchondriac is someone who surfs the Web about a medical problem […]
Today’s Wall Street Journal includes a special Big Issues health care section. A post on their blog caught my attention: Should Patient Have Electronic Identification Numbers? The idea is that people who use health care would each be assigned a universal patient identifier, or UPI. This unique number would link to a person’s health records. […]
Tomorrow the American Society of Clinical Oncology* will host its 9th annual GI Cancers Symposium. Bloomberg and the LA Times have already reported findings of a paper, still in abstract form, to be presented on Saturday. The drug of interest is regorafenib, a pill that loosely inhibits quite a few kinases – enzymes critical in […]
Yesterday’s Times offered two distinct perspectives on weight loss. One, a detailed feature on gastric surgery by Anemona Hartocollis, details the plight of a young obese woman who opts for Lap-band surgery. In this procedure, surgeons wrap a constricting band of silicone around the stomach so that patients will feel full upon eating less food […]
This week the ACS released its annual report on Cancer Facts and Figures in the U.S. The journal Cancer analyzes and considers the data in a helpful article. Some of the key and mainly positive findings have been covered elsewhere: Between 1990 and 2008, death rates from cancer in the U.S. declined rather steadily, overall, by […]
Nature just published a feature: Trial by Twitter. The piece considers the predicament of researchers who may find themselves ill-prepared to deal with a barrage of unsolicited and immediate on-line “reviews” of their published work. The author of the Nature News piece, science journalist A. Mandavilli, does a great job covering the pros and cons of Twitter “comments” […]
Under the radar, over the holiday week, the NEJM published a report on transfusion requirements in older adults who surgical hip repair. The main finding is that most patients, including the elderly and those at risk for cardiac complications of the procedure, don’t benefit from getting so many red blood cell transfusions as is commonly […]
The author is saddened to learn that Christopher Hitchens died late yesterday evening at the age of 62, roughly a year and a half after receiving a diagnosis of esophageal cancer. He was a prolific and articulate man; I respected him for his words. His essays on the language and cancer might be of particular […]
Is a question I ask myself almost every day. When I started this blog, it was partly a response to what I perceived an unbalanced attack on the value of breast cancer screening by the mainstream news outlets. Why it’s continued is, mainly, that I find it liberating and, in a strange way, fun. As […]
Dr. Donald Berwick left his position last week as head of CMS. He said this, as quoted in the WSJ’s Washington Wire, yesterday: “Maybe a real death panel is a group of people who tell health care insurers that is it OK to take insurance away from people because they are sick or are at […]
There’s a ton of BC and women’s health news this week. But yours truly is, among other things, not in San Antonio where is the 34th annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. NTW, quite a few major news outlets are covering this business closely and carefully, as are some bloggers I know. Upon reading the […]
A hit in the women’s breast cancer Twitter league came my way from the Breast Cancer Sisterhood®. Brenda Coffee, a survivor and founder of the Survivorship Media Network, offers a serious post on What Your Oncologist Doesn’t Tell You About Sex. There’s a music video, Don’t Touch Me that’s annoying but depressingly right on how […]
My fingers stopped this morning for a while when I came upon a reference to @whymommy. Last thing I read about her condition, she was at home having a tough but cozy Thanksgiving at home. Now she’s in the hospital and in her words, OK. Susan is a woman in her 30s with metastatic breast […]
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 […]
For the weekend – A tweet led me to a fantastically inventive kind of music. The Radioactive Orchestra comprises 3175 radioisotopes. From the website: “Melodies are created by simulating what happens in the atomic nucleus when it decays from its excited nuclear state…Every isotope has a unique set of possible excited states and decay patterns…” The project, […]
The latest issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine contains 2 noteworthy papers on cervical cancer screening. The first, a systematic review of studies commissioned by the USPSTF, looked at 3 methods for evaluating abnormalities in women over 30 years: 1. Conventional cytology (as in a Pap smear; the cervix is scraped and cells splayed […]
A short note on Cutting for Stone, a novel I’ve just read by Dr. Abraham Verghese. He’s an expert clinician and professor at Stanford. The author uses rich language to detail aspects of Ethiopian history, medicine and quirks of human nature. The book’s a bit long but a page-turner, like some lives, taking a strange […]
