MD – Page 2 – The Health Care Blog

Our Cancer Journey

May 10, 2012• 6

By John Halamka, MD

Kathy heads to surgery tomorrow at 7am. She’ll be NPO (nothing by mouth) after midnight. She’ll wake at 5am, shower with Hibiclens (a antibacterial prep), and I’ll drive her to surgical check in. Prior to surgery, the radiology department will insert a wire adjacent to the titanium markers that were placed in her tumor at first diagnosis. Her surgeon will use this wire to guide the lumpectomy.

Her left breast will become smaller than her right. She jokes that her career in exotic dancing will come to an end.

The operating room will call me at the end of her procedure and I’ll pick her up. Since she’ll not have had general anesthesia, we’re presuming she’ll feel good enough for a bit of an extended ride home. The last of our chickens arrives on Friday (Buff Orpington’s) and we’ll pick them up as we drive back to our new farm.

We’ll anxiously await the results of pathology. If the margins on the lumpectomy tissue are clear, Kathy will start Radiation Therapy 1-2 months after surgery, likely late June or early July.

By Labor Day, if all goes well, this phase of our cancer journey will end, although our continued vigilance for reoccurrence will be lifelong.

The Benefit of the Doubt

Dec 4, 2008• 14

Valjones

By Val Jones M.D.

Today a dear friend of mine told me a horror story about her recent trip to a hospital ER. She has kidney stones, with rare bouts of excruciating pain when they decide to break off from their renal resting place and scrape their way down her ureters.

My friend is a stoic person who also doesn’t like to cause trouble for others – so when she was awoken at 4am with that same familiar pain, she decided not to call an ambulance but rather drive herself to the ER. She also chose not to call her doctor out of consideration for his sleep needs.

She managed to make it to the triage desk at her local hospital and was relieved to see that the ER was quite empty. There were no ambulances in the docks, no one in the waiting area, and no sign of any trauma or resuscitations in the trauma bay. She approached the desk trembling in pain and put her health insurance card, driver’s license, and hospital card on the desk and let the clerk know that she was in incredible pain.

Consumer-Generated Clinical Trials? Research Minus Science = Gossip

Nov 21, 2008• 7

By Val Jones MD

Valjones My readers know how passionate I am about
protecting the public from misleading health information. I
have
witnessed first-hand
many well-meaning attempts to “empower consumers” with Web 2.0 tools.
Unfortunately, they were designed without a clear understanding of the
scientific method, basic statistics, or in some cases, common sense.

Let me first say that I desperately want my patients to be
knowledgeable about their disease or condition. The quality of their
self-care depends on that, and I regularly point each of my patients to
trusted sources of health information so that they can be fully
informed about all aspects of their health. Informed decisions are
founded upon good information. But when the foundation is corrupt –
consumer empowerment collapses like a house of cards.

In a recent lecture on Health 2.0, it was suggested that websites
that enable patients to “conduct their own clinical trials” are the
bold new frontier of research. This assertion betrays a lack of
understanding of basic scientific principles. In healthcare we often
say, “the plural of anecdote is not data” and I would translate that to
“research minus science equals gossip.” Let me give you some examples
of Health 2.0 gone wild: