iPod Therapy – Why Not Prescribe It?
Yours truly, the author of Medical Lessons, is listening to music while she writes. A live version of the Stones’ “Silver Train” has just come on, and she’s happily reminded of something that happened 30 ...
from the author
End of Summer Blog-Break
Dear Readers, ML will take a blogging break through Labor Day. I hope the storm doesn’t cause too much damage. Stay safe, wherever you are, and enjoy these end-of-summer days! – ES —- Related Posts:Reading ...
Vicious Verbiage Targets Cancer Patients’ Voices, at Cardiobrief
A journalist who covers medical matters of the heart grabbed my attention on the Fourth of July. In The Voice of the Patient: Time To Bring Out the Muzzle?, Larry Husten at Forbes’ Cardiobrief blog, insinuates ...
No Room For Emotion or Exceptions to the Rule (on Avastin)
My cousin testified before the FDA oncology advisory board on Tuesday about her experience taking Avastin. This is a tragedy, to deny the only drug that is keeping a 51 year old woman alive. You ...
Some Articles I Authored A While Ago
This post, on my research in cancer immunology, is strangely personal. At one level, what follows is nothing more than a list, a narrative if you will, a sketch of a formative chunk of my ...
On the Importance of Giving Blood
The other day I wrote on advances in artificial red blood cells and developing platelets from stem cells. But those methods are in early research phases. Meanwhile, many patients need blood donated by adult humans, ...
Medical Lessons is One Year Old!
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 ...
End of October, Breast Cancer Fatigue
Today the author fears she is suffering from breast cancer fatigue syndrome, an unofficial and possibly infectious condition that she named this morning, that comes from too much thinking about breast cancer and the incidence ...
Eight Years
Today marks exactly eight years since Dr. L., the fine radiologist who may have saved my life, called to let me know about my breast cancer diagnosis. With deep-felt thanks to my doctors, my friends, ...
Living Like It’s Shark Week!
Today is the start of this year’s Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Dialog from NBC’s 30 Rock, Season 1, Episode 4 “Jack the Writer” (2006)*: Tracy Jordan: But I want you to know something… You and ...
Why Medical Lessons?
One of the things I liked best about practicing medicine is that I was constantly learning.
Making rounds at seven in the morning on an oncology floor would be a chore if you didn’t get to examine and think and figure out what’s happening to a man with leukemia whose platelets are dangerously low, or whose lymphoma is responding to treatment but can’t take anymore medicine because of an intense, burn-like rash. You’d have to look stuff up, sort among clues
Hello Readers!
Well, I went ahead and started this blog without a proper introduction. Why was I in such a hurry?
Because I think the media’s getting – and giving – the wrong message on breast cancer screening. When it comes to long, boring medical publications like those published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, perhaps it’s not the devil that’s in the details so much as are the facts.
More on that tomorrow –