When I was young and foolish and just starting out in my career, I found it very hard to take “no” for an answer. If a patient needed radiation therapy, and he or she didn’t want to have it, I did my very best to talk that patient into it. I have always been a very persuasive person—if I didn’t get the go ahead on the first formal consultation, there ...
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“Great,” I thought, as I stood at my desk, looking at my patient list early in the morning. She was coming in today. “She” was a patient of mine in her forties, with newly diagnosed triple-negative breast cancer, without nodal involvement. Our first meeting had been several months ago, and it had not been a good one.
I had asked about her ...
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When my daughter was born, I hired a nanny. Her name was Kelly. She was great, a savior. She collaborated with me in running the household, enforcing the rules of the home. She even had a set of her own rules. I learned from her and her rules because she had more experience tending children than me. She wasn’t a dictator, ...
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I was watching a macho shoot-em-up movie the other day; the type where everyone shoots everyone and in the final scene, the dirty blood-stained hero rides homeward on a helicopter or maybe a horse, into a red sunrise or sunset. He stares blankly, focused on nothing, focused on everything, his look reflecting the turmoil of what he has seen, done and lost. The hero’s grease-smeared face shows the understanding that ...
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Just three words, a short phrase, heard from an ICU nurse that changed my friend’s well-being as she lay in an ICU bed. In fact, it is the only phrase my friend remembers from her entire hospital stay after having brain surgery to remove a tumor.
She was experiencing nausea, a sick feeling, and needing and wanting care, direction, and guidance from hospital staff. And three powerful words spoken from a ...
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If you desire healing,
let yourself fall ill
let yourself fall ill.
-Rumi
Yesterday I saw a patient—an 80 year old woman with metastatic cancer involving her bones. She had near complete replacement of her twelfth thoracic vertebra by tumor, and also significant destruction of her fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae, demonstrated by PET-CT scan and bone scan.
She had so much pain in her legs that it was difficult to walk. In ...
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Brought to you by MedPage Today.
1. Functional MRI Can Be Used to Assess Pain. Data from several studies have shown that it's possible to assess and differentiate pain through an fMRI scan.
2. Big Spread Seen in Lung Cancer False Positives. Nationwide, one patient in 10 operated on for suspected lung cancer had benign disease, but the false positive rates varied widely ...
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I was very saddened to learn of the death of Roger Ebert. I, like so many around the world, was impressed and inspired at how he handled himself in the aftermath of his cancer surgery years ago that left him disabled and disfigured and unable to eat, drink or speak. And yet, despite his struggles he remained a dominant force in film ...
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Brought to you by MedPage Today.
1. Breast Cancer Mortality Gap Still Baffling. The mystery of why black women have higher risk of breast cancer mortality than whites remains just that -- a mystery.
2. Immune Therapy Offers Hope in Ovarian Cancer. A novel two-step immunotherapy process appears to be effective in nearly three-fourths of women with advanced ovarian cancer.
3. HER2 ...
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When we told the patient and his family that the mass in his lung was highly concerning for cancer, he didn’t say anything. His daughter asked about his symptoms. His son-in-law asked when and how he could get a definitive diagnosis. His wife asked when he could go home. Finally, he spoke.
“I’m sorry for being so much trouble.” The tone was casually apologetic, ...
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"A comprehensive and extremely useful roadmap for doctors."
-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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