October 11th, 2011 by Iltifat Husain, M.D. in Opinion
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Doctors love their Apple Products. Just walk into any hospital ward, and see the types of mobile devices we are using. At weekly Grand Rounds conferences, you see plenty of iPads in use. At physician meetings, the laptop of choice is often the Macbook Pro. The data backs these anecdotal examples as well.
Doctors love their Apple Products – and Steve Jobs was obviously an extension of these products, often times cited as the singular force behind these products, and it’s why physicians who love his products mourn his passing.
There are three specific reasons why :
1) Simplicity
In medicine, we deal with enough complexity. Knowing disease pathology and the mechanism of various illnesses and their treatments is a fascinating exercise, but it’s taxing. For every known in medicine, there are at least five unknowns. It’s what makes being a physician exciting, but stressful as well. We’re always on high alert – especially those of us who practice in the critical care arena.
Juxtaposed to this is Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
October 1st, 2011 by KennyLinMD in Book Reviews, Opinion
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Recently, I had a conversation with Shannon Brownlee (the widely respected science journalist and acting director of the Health Policy Program at the New America Foundation) about whether men should continue to have access to the PSA test for prostate cancer screening, despite the overwhelming evidence that it extends few, if any, lives and harms many more men than it benefits. She felt that if patients could be provided with truly unbiased information and appropriate decision aids, they should still be able to choose to have the test (and have it covered by medical insurance). Believing that one of the most important roles of doctors is to prevent patients from making bad decisions, I disagreed.
After reading Your Medical Mind, the new book by Harvard oncologist and New Yorker columnist Jerome Groopman, I think he would probably side with Brownlee’s point of view. Groopman, whose authoring credits include the 2007 bestseller How Doctors Think, and wife Pamela Hartzband, MD have written a kind of sequel to that book that could have easily been titled How Patients Think. Drawing on interviews with dozens of patients about a wide variety of medical decisions – from starting a cholesterol-lowering drug, to having knee surgery, to accepting or refusing heroic end-of-life interventions – the authors Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Common Sense Family Doctor*
September 20th, 2011 by RamonaBatesMD in Research
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Somewhere along the line I learned to encourage women with a family history of breast cancer to begin getting mammograms at an age 10 years prior to when their mother was diagnosed and to encourage their daughters to begin getting mammograms at an age 10 years prior to when they themselves were ever diagnosed.
I learned this prior to the discovery of BRCA genes. It was a trend that had been noted among women with strong family histories. The new study (see full reference below) in the journal Cancer verifies that genetic breast cancers show up earlier in the next generation – on average by 8 years.
The study from MD Anderson looked at 2 generations of families with the BRCA gene to assess the age at diagnosis. Using the pool of 132 BRCA-positive women with breast cancer who participated in the high-risk protocol at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (Gen 2), 106 women could be paired with a family member in the previous generation (Gen 1) who was diagnosed with a BRCA-related cancer (either breast cancer or ovarian cancer).
The median age of cancer diagnosis was Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*
August 29th, 2011 by Elaine Schattner, M.D. in News
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Recently, the FDA announced its approval, upon accelerated review, of a new drug, Adcetris (brentuximab) for patients with Hodgkin’s lymphoma that has relapsed after bone marrow transplant and for some patients with T-cell anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL).
This interests me for a lot of reasons, among them that I used to work in the field of lymphoma immunology and spent some time in my life studying molecules like CD30, the protein to which the new antibody binds.
First, a mini-primer on the disease and numbers of patients involved: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medical Lessons*
August 18th, 2011 by AndrewSchorr in Opinion, Research
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You heard about it first on Patient Power when, a couple of years ago, we interviewed Dr. Andrew Lowy, oncology surgeon at UC San Diego Medical Center. He explained how some patients with advanced cancer spread in their abdomen could benefit from an open surgery – perhaps as much as nine hours long – where, after snipping out visible cancer – the organs are bathed in heated chemotherapy for 90 minutes. You may recall the story of Jennifer Ambrose, a young mom from suburban Chicago, who developed cancer of the appendix. She tracked down Dr. Lowy after spotting him on the Internet. She traveled to San Diego, had the “hot chemo” procedure, recovered and then went on to have a second child – her “miracle baby.” Today Jennifer remains fine and her story is featured in my book, The Web-Savvy Patient.
Jennifer Ambrose’s Powerful Patient Video
Today Andrew Pollack, reporter for The New York Times, wrote a front page story about Dr. Lowy, hot chemo, and how other medical centers are now picking up on it for other advanced cancers including colon and ovarian. They are even advertising it as one last bit of hope when often there is virtually none. Now, some of the big names in GI cancers are suggesting this approach has merit and may offer longer survival then some super expensive drugs. There’s a debate going on. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Andrew's Blog*
