Reading Toms River
The residents hadn’t a clue what was happening to their water. Fagin, an environmental journalist, wades through a half century of dumping, denial, Greenpeace efforts to expose the situation, local citizens’ mixed responses…
Finding Kindness and Introspection in ‘Half Empty,’ a Book of Essays by David Rakoff
the words we use matter enormously, not just in clinical outcomes, but in how people with cancer feel about the decisions they’ve made, years later.
Reading and Hearing ‘Bang the Drum Slowly’
This slim 1956 novel by Mark Harris, oddly elegant in its tenderness and guyish language, resonates today.
A Comedian Tells the Story of His Child’s Cancer
Yesterday a video came my way on Facebook. It’s a stand-up piece by Anthony Griffith, who tells what it was like working as a comedian when his 2-year old daughter had recurrent cancer and died….This 9 minute clip packs sadness and pain:
Notes on the Social History of American Medicine, Self Reliance and Health Care, Today
…a bit on the history of health care in the United States. The Social Transformation of American Medicine, by Paul Starr, was first published in 1982. The author, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton, gives a fascinating, still-relevant account…
Living Like It’s Shark Week, Take 3
It’s Shark Week, or at least that’s the situation over at Discovery Channel. The annual, virtual immersion into the world of cartilaginous fish has been adopted by your author as some sort of metaphor, but she’s not sure…
Another Take on Not Smoking, the Law and Tolerance
This vignette offers a 1930s perspective on what some call social health – that an individual’s behavior might be influenced by neighbors’ and coworkers’ attitudes.
Reading Between the Lines, and Learning from an Epidemiologist
She writes: “I believe that every educated person must at the very least understand how these interpreters of medical knowledge examine, or should examine, it to arrive at the conclusions.”
On Sheryl Crow’s Report that She Has a Meningioma, and Singing Loud
Fortunately the LATimes and People magazine got the story right. Their headlines, and text, emphasize the benign nature of Crow’s newly-diagnosed condition, a meningioma.
Review: Dr. Eric Topol’s Creative Destruction of Medicine
Topol’s comfortable writing about the intersection of science and medicine as few physicians are….One theme that emerges through the book is the capacity for technology – by “knowing” and processing so much real-time information about each person’s condition – to inform more effective, individualized treatments.
Notes, on Running a Hospital and ‘Goal Play’
“Goal Play!” articulates how positive, team-oriented guidance and genuine concern for employees’ well-being can have a positive impact on the lives and careers of valued health care workers and their patients.
50-50, A Serious Film About a Young Man With a Rare Cancer
The movie, based in part on the true story of scriptwriter Will Reiser, surprised me by its candor. Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt smoothly portrays Adam Lerner, who soon finds out he has cancer. The opening scene
73 Cents: A Film on Regina Holliday’s Work, and Patient Advocacy Through Art
The unreasonable price of the medical records, combined with the delay in receiving them, exemplifies unnecessary harms patients encounter in an outdated, disjointed health care system.
The Iron Lady, a Film About an Aging Woman
Over the weekend I saw the Iron Lady, a movie about Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of England. I expected a top-notch, accented and nuanced performance by Meryl Streep, and got that. The film surprised me in several respects. It’s really about aging, and how a fiercely independent woman withers. The camera takes you within her […]
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Narrative of Cancer History and Ideas
This week I finished reading the Emperor of All Maladies, the 2010 “biography” of cancer by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. The author, a medical oncologist and researcher now at Columbia University, provides a detailed account of malignancies – and how physicians and scientists have understood and approached a myriad of tumors – through history. The encyclopedic, […]
The BC Sisterhood Takes on Sex After Cancer and What Oncologists Don’t Say
A hit in the women’s breast cancer Twitter league came my way from the Breast Cancer Sisterhood®. Brenda Coffee, a survivor and founder of the Survivorship Media Network, offers a serious post on What Your Oncologist Doesn’t Tell You About Sex. There’s a music video, Don’t Touch Me that’s annoying but depressingly right on how […]
New Music from an Orchestra of Radioactive Isotopes
For the weekend – A tweet led me to a fantastically inventive kind of music. The Radioactive Orchestra comprises 3175 radioisotopes. From the website: “Melodies are created by simulating what happens in the atomic nucleus when it decays from its excited nuclear state…Every isotope has a unique set of possible excited states and decay patterns…” The project, […]
‘Cutting For Stone,’ and Considering the Experience of Practicing Medicine
A short note on Cutting for Stone, a novel I’ve just read by Dr. Abraham Verghese. He’s an expert clinician and professor at Stanford. The author uses rich language to detail aspects of Ethiopian history, medicine and quirks of human nature. The book’s a bit long but a page-turner, like some lives, taking a strange […]
President Obama Talks About Smoking and Tobacco
Today’s ML comes straight from the Oval Office. President Obama talks about smoking, and how hard it is to stop, and what can be done to reduce the use and long-term health consequences of tobacco. What I like about this Presidential health advisory: He credits the ACS, which is sponsoring a smokeout today. He’s clear about […]
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 years ago. Distracting? Yes. Calming? Yes. Paradoxically helps to keep me on track? Yes. My iPod keeps my mind from […]