Maybe I should’ve noticed how she looked… “She” was a new patient, Louise*, and she had been diagnosed with stage IV cervical cancer. Only in her 40s, the diagnosis had hit her extremely hard. At her first...
Dressed in the black-and-white-striped soccer referee shirt, I looked like roadkill on a black asphalt road with the white sidewalk markings. It reminded me of how uncomfortable I...
I often am asked for opinions about hematology/oncology cases from colleagues around the country. Additionally, whenever a family friend or relative is diagnosed with cancer, I also often am asked...
Everyone’s talking about health care costs these days. The presentations usually start with a chart of rising health care expenditures, the tip of the line pointing skywards. Next come exhaustive (and...
Do you know that flying in an airplane 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for a few years is safer than being a patient in a hospital for a fraction of a day?
Our practice recently had a visiting speaker sponsored by a pharmaceutical company speaking on a new drug for the treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer. As part of the presentation, a Phase III randomized...
“What do you think?” my nurse, Laura, had asked as we discussed her call from Ms. Lyons*. Ms. Lyons, an ovarian cancer survivor whom I have known for years, had called Laura after she had developed a...
"Value-Based Medicine," if not yet a term for the ages, is an increasingly embraced concept for our times of diminishing health care resources, a time for doing more with less. The risks of not taking this...