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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. See more How Much Do You Want Your Doctors To Say About Risks of Treatment? 
I want my doctors to be happy, up-to-date, and rested. What’s the point of so many busy, needed health professionals writing about their experiences or opinions, except if it’s for their own satisfaction? Whatever the reasons are that most doctors don’t bring up the issue, one might ask this: Why do adults need doctors to tell them about the health benefits of regular exercise? After all, it’s common knowledge – See more Do Adults Need Physicians to Tell Them to Exercise? I stayed up last night watching the Big C. The latest episode, The Darkest Day, takes place on Dec 21 at the end of the show’s pseudo-fall second season. Here, two things happen of above-average interest to this doctor-patient-viewer: First, the characters’ usual and crude shenanigans are interrupted by Cathy’s visit to a class of future cancer doctors. (Can we say “oncologists”? No, it’s too big a word for this program.) Second, Cathy aborts her family’s planned vacation to stay with her friend Lee, who’s dying. Her decision to stay with Lee is perhaps the most interesting, and controversial, decision she’s made so far, but I won’t harp on this, because how can anyone judge what she’s doing? The lecture scene: Dr. Sherman (Alan Alda) “presents” Cathy (Laura Linney) to his class, a group of diverse young people most of whom are taking notes on (Apple – another story) laptops See more Cathy Tells Future Cancer Docs to Shut their Laptops and Speak Plainly 
I’m coming down hard on the CDC’s fake zombie alert/true public awareness campaign. Here’s how it seemed to this reader: First, a late-afternoon feed from Wednesday’s WSJ Health blog alerted me to what might be strange happenings: CDC Advises on Zombie Apocalypse … and Other Emergencies. If this title had come from another, less serious source, I would have ignored what I thought was a joke. But, coming from where it did, I clicked. Here’s what the WSJ blog had to say: Uncle Sam wants YOU to be prepared for a zombie apocalypse. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, known best for stamping out health threats like Ebola and E. coli, is now advising people how to prepare for a zombie invasion… Okay, the agency really is just looking for a clever way to get people to heed its advice on how to prepare for emergencies such as hurricanes See more On Fake Zombies, and Mistakes at the CDC’s Public Health Matters Blog 
Today Scientific American shared this bit from its 50-year archive, by the mathematician Sherman K. Stein, recounting an interview with the composer George Perle on a theory of rhythm developed in India over 1000 years ago: While reading about this theory,’ he said, ‘I learned my one and only Sanskrit word: yamátárájabhánasalagám.’ I asked him what it meant. ‘It’s just a nonsense word invented as a memory aid for Indian drummers.… As you pronounce the word you sweep out all possible triplets of short and long beats.’ Sounds like onomatopoeia, or something similar in ancient Indian music parlance. But I’m no drummer, and I don’t know Sanskrit. It’s got me wondering about the thousands of ancient, hard-to-spell-or-say terms, not rooted in Greek or Latin, for complex medical conditions doctors use today, about which we have so little knowledge. — Related Posts:Reading and Hearing ‘Bang the Drum Slowly’How Much Do You Want Your Doctors To Say About Risks of Treatment?I Hope My Doctors Aren’t Blogging Too MuchDo Adults Need Physicians to Tell Them to Exercise?Cyberchondria Rising – What is the Term’s Meaning and History? 
Last night I began reading a long essay, Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag. The work dates to 1993, and centers on the power of photographs of war. She considers Virginia Woolf’s earlier reflections on horrific images from the Spanish Civil War, in Three Guineas. Sontag writes: “Not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them, not to strive to abolish what causes this havoc…for Woolf, would be the reactions of a moral monster… Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality in mind.” This morning I awoke early and saw video of an earthquake rattling portions of Japan and a tsunami destroying broad swaths of land in a country where I’ve never been. I’m distracted by those images and while I’m trying to work on another subject, my mind flips back to what’s going on there, along See more Contemplating Empathy, Early This Morning After the Earthquake 
A series of clicks this morning brought me to an interesting web finding in a Wiki-like Dead Media Archive that links to NYU’s Steinhart School of Media, Culture, and Communication. Dead Media Archive, NYU Steinhardt School of Media, Culture and Communication And there rests the Notificator, said (by me) to be Twitter’s great-great-great grandfather, with details: On September 9, 1932, the London Times printed an article following up on a “correspondence in The Times proposing that British railway stations might, like those in Japan, provide facilities for messages from one person to another to be displayed.” An electrical engineer had written to the paper, agreeing, and noted a device that he had heard of; an “automatic machine…to be installed at stations and other suitable sites, and on the insertion of two pennies facilities were given for writing a message that remained in view for two hours after writing.” The See more Twitter, The Notificator, and Old Social Media News |
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