Ten years ago, my tennis partner suffered a stroke. He was a sixty-year-old at the time, working to move up into the top ten players in his age group. In the country! You could not have found a healthier sixty-year-old. He played tennis three-plus hours a day, scampering across the court like a hyperactive adolescent. …
I have been thinking a lot about C Everett Koop lately, ever since his death on February 25 at the ripe old age of 96 and more recently with the announcement that our current Surgeon General, Regina Benjamin, is planning to step down from that post. In particular, I have been pondering what made Koop…
As a physician who conducts research on decision-making, I have been asked many times: What does behavioral economics teach us about the role of living wills in medical care? Famed behavioral economist Dick Thaler recently opined on this topic in the New York Times, stating his support for a “requirement that all patients meet with their…
Jennifer spends lots of time with dead things, dead humans actually. She works in a pathology lab. One night, she is asked to incinerate a fresh human cadaver, and she is struck that it would be a waste to throw away perfectly good meat. So, even though she is against killing and is a vegetarian for moral reasons, she…
According to the New York Times, the Boy Scouts of America on Friday proposed ending its ban on openly gay scouts but continue to bar gay adults from serving as leaders. This policy is wrongheaded, regardless of whether you think homosexuality is right or wrong. By pushing gay men further into the back of the closet,…
“I can fix this.” The neurosurgeon was nothing if not confident. “The cyst is pushing on your spinal cord. If it continues to expand, it will damage your nerves and you may lose the ability to walk. But I can remove the cyst, and cure you.” The patient was a business school professor, a man…
Recently I received an email from someone I have never met, who asked me the following: “Could you refer me to any current study results on Arimidex (Anastrozole)? My oncologist is not helpful. My oncotype dx said I have 9% chance of recurrence and with Arimidex for 5 years that is reduced to 4.5 %….
Before patients can become savvy consumers of healthcare, they need information about their healthcare choices. Too often, such information is nearly impossible to get, especially when it requires doctors to give patients useful statistics about things like treatment side effects. Since publishing Critical Decisions this fall, I have received a number of emails from readers who…
Lance Armstrong cheated and bullied. These are not shocking revelations. Oscar Pistorius had a history of altercations with his girlfriend and is now accused of murder. More shocking, by far, but hardly the first athlete to be accused of such wrong doing. Should we be so thoroughly shocked to find out the Armstrong and Pistorius…
In her deservedly best-selling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot reproduces the language of Lacks’s informed consent document when she was about to undergoing her cancer surgery at Johns Hopkins in 1951: I hereby give consent to the staff of the Johns Hopkins Hospital to perform any operative procedures and under any anesthetic…