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.
In his latest New Yorker piece The Truth Wears Off, Jonah Lehrer directs our attention to the lack of reproducibility of results in scientific research. The problem is pervasive, he says: …now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed finding have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims […]
Some weeks ago I discovered Happy’s hilarious Xtranormal videos on his anonymous blog. Yesterday I laughed watching the Hospitalist vs the ER: — I can’t tell you much about who the Happy Hospitalist is. His is one of the few anonymous blogs I read. Based on the apparent relevance of cars and parking lots in […]
— (and to Other Physicians, Division Chiefs, Hospital Administrators and Everyone Else With Responsibilities for Other Humans): Yesterday I started but didn’t complete a post on the interesting concept of the Decline Effect. I got caught up with several extra-ML responsibilities that kept me busy until very late last night, which became morning before […]
The word of the week appears on the front page of today’s New York Times in an article on a crowd-sourced response to WikiLeaks: “the Internet assaults underlined the growing reach of self-described “cyberanarchists,” antigovernment and anticorporate activists who have made an icon of Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian.” You won’t find a cyberanarchist reference […]
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. 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 […]
Dear Readers, I am sad to learn of the death of Elizabeth Edwards, who died earlier today of metastatic breast cancer at the age of 61. She has taught countless people about what it’s like to live with cancer. My thoughts are with her family now. -ES Related Posts:No Related Posts
On the hematology front – Last weekend at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH), researchers presented data on a new kind of blood thinner. Rivaroxaban (Xarelto) is a pill that works by blocking the activated form of human clotting factor X (Xa). The NEJM published the EINSTEIN* findings on-line ahead of […]
A perspective in this week’s NEJM considers the Emerging Importance of Patient Amenities in Patient Care. The trend is that more hospitals lure patients with hotel-like amenities: room service, magnificent views, massage therapy, family rooms and more. These services sound great, and by some measures can serve an institution’s bottom line more effectively than spending […]
Here’s a partial list of why some thoughtful, articulate patients might be reluctant to mention symptoms to their doctors:
1. Respect for the doctor – when the patient feels what he’s experiencing isn’t worth taking up a physician’s time, what I’d call the “time-worthy” problem;
2. Guilt – when the patient feels she shouldn’t complain about anything relatively minor, because she’s lucky to be alive;
3. Worry – when patient’s anxious or afraid the symptoms are a sign of the condition worsening, and so
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 […]
