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 […]

Posted in from the author, Life, Medical News, Music, PsychiatryTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a Comment on iPod Therapy – Why Not Prescribe It?

Reading About Thinking (on D. Kahneman’s Ideas on Perceptions of Knowledge)

An article appeared in yesterday’s NYT Magazine on the hazards of over-confidence. The Israeli-born psychologist (and epistemologist, I’d dare say), Nobel laureate and author Daniel Kahneman considers how people make decisions based on bits of information that don’t provide an adequate representation of the subject at hand. He recounts how poorly, and firmly, army officers evaluate […]

Posted in Ideas, Magazine, Medical EducationTagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments on Reading About Thinking (on D. Kahneman’s Ideas on Perceptions of Knowledge)

Psychology Colors and Emotions, from the Late Dr. Robert Plutchik

This morning’s med-blog Grand Rounds is up at MedGadget, where my colleague Dr. Nick Genes has put together a nice assortment of reads. One entry refers to the Plutchik Emotion Circumplex – “a wonderful graphic representation of a highly regarded emotion classification system.” I never took psychology in college, and in med school they sent […]

Posted in Blogs, Communication, Life in NYC, PsychiatryTagged , , , , , Leave a Comment on Psychology Colors and Emotions, from the Late Dr. Robert Plutchik

A Note on Positive Thinking

Today I came upon a Jan 24 op-ed, A Fighting Spirit Won’t Change Your Life by Richard Sloan, PhD, of Columbia University’s Psychiatry Department. Somehow I’d missed this worthwhile piece on the sometimes-trendy notion of mind-over-matter in healing and medicine. Sloan opens with aftermath of the Tucson shootings: …Representative Giffords’s husband describes her as a […]

Posted in Ideas, Life as a Patient, Medical EthicsTagged , , , , , Leave a Comment on A Note on Positive Thinking

Mind over Matter? Don’t Kid Yourself (on Stress and BC)

I learned of a new study implicating stress in reduced breast cancer survival by Twitter. A line in my feed alerted me that CNN’s health blog, “Paging Dr. Gupta,” broke embargo on the soon-to-be-published paper in the journal Clinical Cancer Research. The story – that women who undergo a stress relief program live longer after […]

Posted in Breast Cancer, cancer survival, clinical trials, Essential Lessons, Medical News, Oncology (cancer), Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Women's HealthTagged , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments on Mind over Matter? Don’t Kid Yourself (on Stress and BC)
newsletter software