Do you need to explain to the person on the checkout line or, say, a mother organizing a bake sale, why your back hurts? Or why you need a seat on the bus?
See more Should People With Health Problems Talk About their Conditions?
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Today we should move forward on the list published in the NEJM on Bending the Cost Curve in Cancer Care. We’re up to point 7 in our discussion, what’s 2nd in the authors’ proposed changes in attitudes and practice: “Both doctors and patients need to have more realistic expectations.” This point follows closely from the previous, that doctors need to talk with patients earlier on end-of-life issues. But the central issue here is that most patients with cancer are unrealistic about their prognosis, and that oncologists do a terrible job in correcting their misperceptions: …According to one recent study, most of the patients with lung cancer expected to live for more than 2 years even though the average length of survival is about 8 months.3 Resetting expectations will be difficult. Tools are available to help the oncologist provide truly informed consent by sharing anticipated response rates, chances of cure (always See more On Reducing Cancer Care Costs by Resetting Expectations, and Hope 
The situation in Japan remains grim. I can’t reasonably report on this, except to say what’s evident by the photographs, videos and usually-reliable sources: a second reactor may have ruptured. There’s been another burst of radioactivity into the air. Flickr, Official U.S. Air Force photo stream Meanwhile, thousands of bodies are being discovered in the post-Tsunami landscape along the northeast coast. The Emperor’s speech adds a feeling of gravity, essentially unfathomable to those who are not there, and maybe even to those who didn’t live, first, through the atomic bombings in that country 75 years ago. people in a shelter, as shown on NHK world TV Working my/our way* through The Pain of Others, Sontag writes: What to do with such knowledge as photographs bring of faraway suffering? …For all the voyeuristic lure – and the possible satisfaction of knowing, This is not happening to me, I’m not See more Change the Channel? 
I don’t know if makes sense to blog on a book by a woman who’s dead, who wrote about photographs and the news. But new media allows us to try new things, unedited. Here goes: In Regarding the Pain of Others, which I began, unknowingly, on the evening before the recent quake and tsunami, Sontag begins Chapter 2: Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience <she refers mainly to war photography>…‘If it bleeds, it leads’ runs the venerable guideline of tabloids and twenty-four-hour headline news shows – to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view. This observation, published in 2003, would account for CNN’s sending so much of its lead staff – Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Soledad O’Brien and others – to northeastern Japan now. Some of us are drawn to 
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 tweet hit me on Sunday evening, from a stranger: @Mibberz I’m saddened by how many ADULTS can’t get their #rheum 2 understand the level of severity of their pain.What hope is there for my daughter? I half-watched an on-line exchange about the issue, and then went about my family’s dinner preparations. The message came from Amy Cunningham, who blogs about her daughter’s experience with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and uveitis to the starting tune of Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” I couldn’t bear the tracks that followed, playing automatically and disjointedly in multiple browser windows, so I shut them off. But I kept on thinking about the girl’s pain, and the mother’s despair. I wasn’t alone in that. Turns out that Rheumatoid Arthritis Warrior Kelly Young (@rawarrior) was all over the matter. She’s got a Facebook discussion going on the topic and a post today called Some Rheumatologists Don’t Understand See more I Feel Your Pain (not) “The insurance market as it works today basically slices and dices the population. It says, well you people with medical conditions, over here, and you people without them, over here… — Jonathan Cohn, Editor of The New Republic, speaking on The Brian Lehrer Show, February 16, 2010* —– There’s a popular, partly true, sometimes useful and very dangerous notion that we can control our health. Maybe even fend off cancer. I like the idea that we can make smart choices, eat sensible amounts of whole foods… 
This is my first film review, if it is that. I was tempted to write about Ethan Hawke, hematologist among vampires in Daybreakers, but gore’s not my favorite genre. A mainstream choice would have been Harrison Ford solving the enzyme deficiency of Pompe disease in Extraordinary Measures, but I didn’t get sucked in. I chose Precious, instead. This luminous movie relates to the practice of medicine everyday, big-time. See more On Precious |
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