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 morning I visited my spine surgeon for a check-up. What’s nice is the feeling I have about his office staff: they’re pleasant, gentle people who seem always eager in their work, and that helps. I got big hugs from his nurse, an office manager and biller. Even the x-ray technician seemed glad to assist […]
A link to a video, the Too Informed Patient came my way several times lately. You can find the curious clip on NPR’s Marketplace site: The Too Informed Patient from Marketplace on Vimeo. — The skit depicts the interaction between a young man with a rash and his older physician. The patient is an informed […]
Over the long weekend I caught up on some reading. One article stands out. It’s on informed consent, and the stunning disconnect between physicians’ and patients’ understanding of a procedure’s value.
The study used survey methods to evaluate 153 cardiology patients’ understanding of the potential benefit of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI, or angioplasty)…
Yesterday the author of ML wasn’t feeling too well. She had (and has) what’s probably a recurrent bout of diverticulitis, a condition when a little pouch stemming from the colon becomes inflamed and causes pain and fever. This can be serious if infection of the colon’s wall progresses, or catastrophic if the colon ruptures. So […]
When I practiced oncology, I relished time talking with patients and their loved ones about tough decisions – when an indolent condition accelerated and it seemed time to bite the bullet and start treatment, or when a cancer stopped responding to treatment and it seemed right to shift gears and, perhaps, emphasize palliation instead of more chemo, and at every value-loaded decision checkpoint in between.
These conversations weren’t easy; speaking of levels of care, palliation and end-of-life wishes are discussions that many doctors, even oncologists, still avoid.
I’ll be staying near my home in Manhattan this week. But if I did have plans to travel by airplane for the holiday, I think I’d be apprehensive about the new screening procedures implemented by the Transportation Safety Authority (TSA).
My concern is not so much with the scanners…Rather, I’m worried about screening errors – false positive and false negative results, and about harms – physical and/or emotional, that patients and people with disability may experience during the screening process.
“I don’t want to get sicker trying to get better and then just end up dying anyway” – Cathy, the 42 year old protagonist, with advanced melanoma, on the Big C.
Spoiler alert: Don’t read this post if you don’t want to know what happens to Cathy in the Big C…After months of unusual and comfort zone-breaking behavior, Cathy
I’m a bit puzzled by all the excitement about Merck’s new drug, Anacetrapib (MK-0859), that’s said to lower risk for cardiovascular disease by lowering bad cholesterol. Earlier this week at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association, researchers presented promising findings on the drug, including results from the phase III DEFINE trial. The list of disclosures for that abstract is long and fairly shocking. On Wednesday, the results were published on-line in the NEJM.*
The new drug interests me, as an oncologist, because it’s an enzyme inhibitor …
Today Medical Lessons is one year old. That’s an important milestone in any blog’s life, as I suppose it is in this author’s. Why blog, a mother in medicine might ask me. I’m having fun with this project, for starters. Since November 17, 2009, I’ve taught myself how to use WordPress, learned the ins and […]
Last night I stayed up late to see the season finale of the Big C. For the first time in watching this series about a 42 year old woman with advanced melanoma, in a near-final scene involving the protagonist Cathy’s teenage son, I cried.
The storyline is moving, finally, in a real and not necessarily happy direction.
This post is intended mainly for medical bloggers, but it has applications elsewhere. It’s about links and uniform resource locators (URLs), terms that I didn’t fully appreciate until the last year or so. That’s because like most of my colleagues and readers, I grew up reading printed books, newspapers and magazines. Now, perhaps as much as 90 percent of the non-fiction I read is on-line.
The Web has a lot of advantages for readers – you can see multimedia presentations, or double-click to enlarge a graph of interest. What I think is best, though, is the third
The November AARP Bulletin highlights a promising development in hospital couture: trendsetter Diane von Furstenberg has designed new, unisex gowns ready for wearing in hospitals. The new gowns provide style and full coverage, with options for opening in front or back according to the bulletin. A trial is underway at the Cleveland Clinic.
I’ve been wondering, lately, why so many of the medical blogs cover the same topics, like last week’s lung cancer detection trial, which are often the exact same studies as are reported by conventional news outlets. I’ve been trying, here, to sometimes consider new published articles that seem important to me but, for whatever reasons, don’t get so much attention.
Here’s one:
Yesterday’s NEJM includes an article Romiplostim or Standard of Care in Patients with Immune Thrombocytopenia.* It’s about a drug, manufactured and sold by Amgen as NPlate, that received FDA approval for treatment of chronic immune thrombocytopenia purpura (ITP) in August, 2008. Some consider ITP a rare disease, and
Franklin’s story starts like this: She was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in London. She excelled in math and science. She studied physical chemistry at Cambridge, where she received her undergraduate degree in 1941. After performing research in photochemistry in the following year on scholarship, she joined the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA) and carried out basic investigations on the micro-structure of coal and carbon compounds, and so earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. She was a polyglot, and next found herself in Paris at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimique de l’Etat, where she picked up some fine skills in x-ray crystallography.
You get the picture: she was smart, well-educated and totally immersed in physical chemistry before, during and after WWII. Single-minded and focused, you might say –
A few weeks ago I found some doctors singing on YouTube. They made me laugh and perhaps, even, feel better. Doctors in Cyberspace I contacted the singing doctors to check, among other things, that they’re still in business. It turns out that Drs. Barry Levy and Greg LaGana both graduated from Cornell University Medical College […]
I was saddened yesterday to learn of the death of Jill Clayburgh. The 66 year old actress died on Friday in her Connecticut home. According to ABC news and the LA Times among other reports, she’d had chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) for 21 years. This means she lived with CLL for nearly a third of […]
In recent years, some physician authors have wrestled with why doctors might want to think twice before “friending” their patients on Facebook. The usual reasons are to protect the physician’s professional image – that the public might see their weirder, or not-so-polished-as-while-working side and, also, to maintain a certain “distance” – lest doctors become so […]
Some months ago I came upon a unique blog, Ars Medica, by Paul O’Connor. The title means “medical arts” in Latin. O’Connor studied medicine before delving into the humanities. Now he writes and gives a seminar on Literature & Medicine at Trinity College in Dublin. The site’s theme is portrayals of physicians, medicine and illness. […]
Today’s Annals of Internal Medicine includes new results for the CLOTS (Clots in Legs Or sTockings after Stroke) Trial. Not-quite acronyms aside, it’s an interesting study with implications for many patients at risk for deep venous thrombosis (DVT). This U.K.-based study, involving 3114 patients in 112 hospitals in 9 countries, used ultrasound to evaluate possible […]
“If it’s chafed, put some lotion on it.”
– some practical advice, offered by the character portraying Andrew Jackson, speaking toward the audience in the last scene of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a play written and directed by Alex Timbers
