A Video Poem: Medical Tests And What “Normal” Means
I’ve written a few times about Veneta Masson, a nurse practitioner who wrote in Health Affairs and the Washington Post about her decision to forego further mammograms despite the fact that she was in a higher-risk category.
Veneta is also a poet. She sent me a video animation of her poem “Reference Range,” which I’m pleased to share with you. I think the poem and the video are beautiful, touching on important issues of how meaningless numbers and scores may be, subject to misinterpretation. She writes:
I see no cause for alarm.
“Is it normal?” you ask.
Normal’s a shell game you seldom win.
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
