May 6th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in Announcements
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The best way to cheer
yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.
– Mark Twain
In this post we focus on cheerful, positive stories – my favorite
blog theme.
The cookie series
Girl Scout cookies – the story of a little girl who went
beyond the call of duty
9/11 cookies – what some of us did on that fateful day
Baking cookies part 2 – how one man made it back from near
death
Good can come from
evil…
The strength of weakness – Dr. Rob shows how we can turn
suffering into a force for good
Back Pain 911 – my own back injury teaches me compassion for
others
More than skin deep – a burn victim finds a way to “pay it forward”
Unexpected heroes
Two teen girls take on Glaxo Smith Kline – the ultimate
David & Goliath story
Spider saves man from cancer – a spider bite called
attention to a suspicious nearby lesion
Make a wish – An 8 year old “President” shows great bravery in
his final months
Your mom will always be your mom – and mine has impulse
control problems
My medical heroes – some doctors who are making a difference
Slice of life
Easter exercises – how creative parents get their kids to
exercise
An elderly woman assesses her healthcare problems
Understanding introverts – they’re worth getting to know
What the heck is a rehab doc? – my specialty is the least
understood in all of medicine!
Well, there you have it.
My thoughts in a nutshell from the past 6 months. Stay tuned for more random thoughts… or make
a suggestion and I may blog about it!
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
May 4th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in True Stories
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A few weeks ago I tripped and fell on the sidewalk. I went down on hands and knees and scraped my left knee pretty badly. The onlookers pretended not to notice, I suppose sparing me the embarrassment of asking if I was ok. I dusted myself off and bled down my leg en route to work.
Since then I kept the wound moist with neosporin and band aids, allowing the skin to heal with minimal scarring. But as I marveled at how painful this little patch of road burn is, I remembered a young girl I met about a decade ago who had a much more serious burn.
Inga was camping with her parents in a synthetic tent. They had spent the day fishing and canoing near a campground somewhere in Eastern Europe. They were huddled together inside the tent in the cool of the evening, speaking animatedly about the day’s events and the beauty of nature when Inga accidentally knocked over the kerosene lamp situated near the exit flap. The kerosene spilled out onto the tent and the fire ignited immediately. The tent began to melt in the fire and the zipper got stuck in the hot plastic material. The unimaginable screams of her dying parents as they burned alive, trapped in this tent, brought help just in time to save Inga’s life.
But Inga was horribly disfigured by the fire. She spent nearly a year in the hospital, receiving skin grafts and fighting off infections. She was eventually able to return to school, but was treated like an outcast. Her former friends were too horrified by her appearance to welcome her back and she spent most of her days sitting alone in the corner, covering her face with a scarf, blaming herself for the death of her own parents.
Her story reached the compassionate ears of a plastic surgeon friend of mine. He traveled to Eastern Europe to meet Inga and see if he could help her. As it turns out, she had no living relatives and was dirt poor. He could see that the medical team taking care of her had carefully covered the defects in her skin, but had not attempted to restore a normal appearance with modern plastic surgery techniques.
The surgeon knew that it would take many surgeries over many years to give her the best result possible. After some debate and soul searching, he decided to sponsor Inga to come to America where he committed to taking care of her financial needs and to giving her a new life.
I first met Inga after she had been in the states for several years. She looked like a burn victim, with tight facial skin and abnormal contours – but compared to how she appeared in the photos of when she first arrived (with no nose or cheek flesh at all) this was a huge improvement. She was meeting with the surgeon to have a seroma evacuated from under her left cheek. He had to remove the extra fluid with a large syringe.
As I watched him numb the area and sink a deep, large bore needle into this young girl’s face, I cringed internally but tried to appear unphased for her sake. She didn’t flinch, but sat staring forward bravely, her grey eyes fixed on the wall in front of her. I saw a tear well up and trickle down her disfigured cheek during the procedure and I instinctively reached for her hand. The tears continued in silence. This burn had penetrated so much deeper than the skin.
I haven’t seen Inga since, though I’ve heard that she’s doing well in school, has made some good friends, and is planning to become a nurse one day. Her decision to devote her life to caring for others is a beautiful example of “paying it forward.”This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
April 27th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in News
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Congress recently directed the Centers for Disease Control
(CDC) to undertake a study in partnership with the Institute of Medicine (IOM). The goal was to establish nutrition guidelines
for government-subsidized nutrition programs in schools nation-wide. These guidelines are meant to help combat the
growing rates of overweight and obesity in US children.
The standards may surprise you in their restrictiveness – no
beverages with more than 5 calories/serving are permitted (excluding milk or
soy milk) unless the child is involved in rigorous physical activity for more
than 1 hour in duration (then they can have a sports drink such as Gatorade). No items with more than 35% of calories from
total sugars are permitted, and all bread and cereal items must be whole grain. There are also restrictions on fat and salt
levels in the food. Artificially
sweetened drinks and caffeinated beverages are not recommended. The IOM also calls for removal of all junk
food and soda machines, and replacement with fruit, milk, and healthy snack options.
Reading these guidelines I thought, “Wow, if kids really ate
this way we probably would make a big difference in obesity rates.”
And then I wondered… “But will these kids just go home and
eat a box of oreos and a liter of coke at the end of the school day? Is it enough to have a healthy food
environment at school, but not at home?
What is the role of parents in this?”
What do you think?
Are the IOM’s recommendations likely to 1) be followed by all schools 2)
make a difference in childrens’ weights?
Is there anything else you’d recommend?This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
April 20th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in Medblogger Shout Outs
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“Be quick to listen, slow to speak.” That’s the old wisdom I was taught growing
up, though it sure is difficult to apply regularly and consistently, isn’t it? Nonetheless I can’t think of a better
principle for practicing good medicine.
I was reading Dr. Smith’s blog and was touched by his
observations:
Patients don’t know
how to put words on their pain, and there is no disease named for the pain that
the patient wants to tell you about. It’s about the inner anguish of this
particular person’s quest for life, their disappointment, the abuse they have
experienced, their feelings of failure and lack of significance, their rage at
the injustices they endure and they don’t have anyone else but you to talk
to. And, by having a relationship with a safe professional, some of their
pain is relieved and, in many cases, they get well or better! In some
cases, they don’t, but that begins to matter less than the fact that you begin
to understand that “getting better” is not the goal here. And,
if you keep trying to make the patient better with a prescription pad, they
will just keep bringing you new problems to chew on until you figure out what
they really need.
The truth is that at the root of many medical
misunderstandings is a listening problem. Sure we hear
lots of things, but in our rush to package complaints into a convenient
diagnosis we often miss the elephant in the room. An excellent example of a doctor practicing
good listening skills was described in Signout’s blog this week.
Some parents appeared a bit overly concerned
about their young child’s cold symptoms. The resident taking care of them
wisely recalled that the mom had mentioned that her aunt died of leukemia
as a child. The doctor made the
connection between that bit of history and their angst – and reassured the
parents that the child’s blood tests were normal, and did not suggest
leukemia (without them directly asking the question). The emotional relief that
ensued was the most therapeutic effect of the physician encounter that day.
The moral of the story is that listening really can be
a healing art. And it’s not just
reserved for psychologists and psychiatrists.
*another case of good listening here*This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
April 4th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in True Stories
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My parents are strong believers in the idea of purposeful exercise. They couldn’t imagine working out in a gym, laboring on a treadmill with nothing accomplished at the end beyond sweating. No, for them, activity is critical – but it has to result in a tangible, quantifiable product.
And so it may come as no surprise that they left Manhattan in the early 70’s to raise their kids on a farm in Canada, where we were kept very busy herding cows, lifting milk crates, feeding pigs, fishing on the nearby ocean, and weeding our very large organic garden.
But as Manhattanites, my parents made sure that I read the New Yorker (we grew up with Calvin Trillin’s children), attended summer school in Paris and ski camp in Switzerland. We took a family vacation each winter to some tropical island, where I played with vacationing city kids.
But this strange combination of “country mouse, town mouse” occasionally produced some rather bizarre traditions – my favorite of which is the annual, December “Easter egg hunt.”
My parents would take us to a rather exclusive golf course on one of our vacation islands, sign up for a round in the late afternoon when most golfers were finishing up, then find us an empty bucket for golf balls. Then we’d walk off in the direction of the 9th hole, and my mom would tell us that there were golf ball “Easter eggs” hidden in the rough patches around the golf course, and that it was our job to fill up the bucket with as many balls as we could find. For young kids, I can tell you, such a challenging and large Easter egg hunt was really exciting.
So I searched fairly systematically through all the patches of rough, proudly announcing each new egg that I had uncovered: “Mom, I found one!” I’d beam, “and this one is bright orange!”
My younger sister wasn’t as successful at locating golf ball eggs. She tended to try to pick them off the fairway, where they were sitting targets. Of course my parents would have to reel her back in, explaining that the Easter eggs were only hidden in the deeper grass.
And we would spend hours and hours on our Easter egg hunts, until the sun set and the crickets drowned out the sound of the ocean waves. We often found an annoyed golf course crew waiting for us to return so they could close their pro-shop. My sister would hand them a bucket brimming with golf balls, saying “we found all these Easter eggs!” And the cuteness of her innocent glee would melt their annoyance as they put the bucket behind the counter, eyeing my parents suspiciously.
But those were good times – where exercise was effortless and fun. Where a common goal drove an entire family to activity, and kids maintained interest in something beyond the TV set.
Now as the real Easter approaches, I imagine what it would be like to return to my childhood activities at a local golf course. I suspect that my physician colleagues would frown upon me collecting stray golf balls at their respective courses. But to tell you the truth, I think that would be more fun than actually playing a round, don’t you?
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
