Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Latest Posts

Chronic Illness And “The Spoon Theory”

Cartoon image of girl carrying a spoon that's as big as she isIf you don’t truly understand how draining it can be to live with chronic illness, including chronic pain, go read The Spoon Theory right now. In five minutes it forever changed my own awareness of my wife’s arthritis and bone pain.

On Twitter I saw “spoonies” raving about this months ago, but I finally took time to read it: 2,100 words and worth every second. Also, on Twitter follow @bydls – “But you don’t look sick!” – and explore their smart website, where they’re wisely selling posters of the story for doctors’ waiting rooms, and everything else imaginable in modern outreach through social media.

These are smart people, and this is a powerful piece of writing.

*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*

5 Reasons Why Patients Don’t Mention Symptoms To Their Doctors

To com­plain or “be good” is an appar­ent dilemma for some patients with seri­ous illness.

Yes­ter­day I received an email from a close friend with advanced breast can­cer. She’s got a lot of symp­toms: Her fatigue is so over­whelm­ing she can’t do more than one activ­ity each day. Yes­ter­day, for exam­ple, she stayed home all day and did noth­ing because she was sup­posed to watch a hockey game in the evening with her teenage son and other fam­ily mem­bers. Her voice is weak, so much it’s hard to talk on the phone. She has dif­fi­culty writ­ing, in the man­ual sense — mean­ing she can’t quite use her right arm and hand properly.

“It’s some­thing I would never men­tion to the doc­tor because it is very sub­tle,” she wrote. “But it has not improved and if any­thing has wors­ened over time.”

There are more than a few pos­si­ble med­ical expla­na­tions for why a per­son who’s receiv­ing breast can­cer ther­apy might not be able to use her right arm. But that’s not the point of today’s les­son. What’s note­wor­thy here is that the patient — an edu­cated, thought­ful woman who’s in what should be the mid­dle of her life and is try­ing as best she can to sur­vive — doesn’t think these symp­toms are worth mentioning. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Medical Lessons*

Failure For A Doctor

I went to a patient’s funeral this past weekend. I generally don’t do that for people whose relationship I’ve built in the exam room. It’s a complex set of emotions, but invariably some family member will start telling others what a nice doctor I am and how much the person had liked me as a doctor. It’s awkward getting a eulogy (literally good words) spoken about me at someone else’s funeral. This patient I had known prior to them becoming my patient, and his wife had been very nice to us when we first moved here from up north.

But that’s not why I am writing this. As I was sitting in the service, the thought occurred to me that a patient’s funeral would be considered by many to be a failure for a doctor. Certainly there are times when that is the case — when the doctor could have intervened and didn’t, or intervened incorrectly, causing the person to die earlier than they could have. Every doctor has some moments where regrets over missed or incorrect diagnosis take their toll. We are imperfect humans, we have bad days, and we don’t always give our patients our best. We have limits. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Distractible Mind*

A Researcher Gets A Taste Of Chronic Illness

I have just a couple of thoughts today that I offer to the reader not for sympathy but, rather, for scientific observation and reflection.

I’ve been dealing with a case of bronchitis that became pneumonia. I tried to teach through it, do grant reviews, finish a book chapter, etc. but was finally ordered by my pulmonologist to recuperative bedrest at home for approximately four weeks.

When told I’d be confined to bed for a month, I thought that it would be great – that I’d get two papers and a grant renewal done and still have plenty of time for blog posts I’ve been wanting to get to, finish writing a couple of songs to take to the studio, get all the tax documents together, maybe learn a little CSS and webpage design and get around to a hosted personal website for the domain I’ve had for a year, etc. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Terra Sigillata*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

Read more »

How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

Read more »

The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

Read more »

Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles