The question of headlines on all Wall Street Journal #health debates #boston

Do we need to wonder why we saw a string of WSJ tweets come in this morning as questions? Didn’t our search engine optimizers tell us to do the same thing? Wouldn’t have be kind of annoying?

Are there any Boston doctors in the long list of posts debating the “Big Issues“? Should we link to them?

Is John Collins,  chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Mass correct when he argues all patients should have unique health-care identification number?

Don Berwick support ACOs? Didn’t  Donald M. Berwick, the  Harvard prof who briefly ran  Centers for Medicare

Is it any surprise that Joeseph Kvedar, director of the Center for Connected Health in Boston urges doctors and patients to communicate via email?

Books by doctors on health reform and beyond

As a freelancer, I’ve been known to grumble about doctors who write. After all, why should they hog the Pulitzers and the pages of The New Yorker when they have perfectly good day jobs? On the other hand, doctors in print often offer us an alternative to the mass-marketed Dr. Oz or the perky, laminated docs on daytime TV’s “The Doctors.”

So put down that Parade magazine. (We’ll admit that  Dr. O has some good advice about sleeping problems.) Instead, check out the always rich “Ideas” section of The Boston Globe, where you’ll find a column by MGH doc Suzanne Koven on doctors who write.

Perhaps so many doctors are writing literature today as an antidote to our increasingly rushed and technological medical practice. There’s less time or incentive to include, in the modern case history, vivid descriptions of a patient’s appearance, details about his occupation and family life, or musings about what might ail him, than there were 100 years ago. When Oliver Sacks showed his friend, W.H. Auden, film clips of the stiff and mute patients about whom he wrote in “Awakenings,’’ he asked the poet “What do you think they lack?’’ “Music,’’ Auden replied. Doctors who write literature supply the grace notes missing from today’s medical records, recapturing the music of the human condition.

Maybe.  The column arrives in anticipation of the release of an anthology “Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors,’’ edited by Leah Kaminsky . And the story includes a list of other works by doctor-writers.

Writing about patients can generate compelling narratives.  Try pitching a story on health reform.  So, we are surprised to see that you need to buy a ticket for the Cambridge reading Jonathan Gruber’s Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It’s Necessary, and How It Works. Maybe we should learn to draw: it’s a comic book.

 

For a more text-based, deeply informed view of politics and health reform, check out the free discussion by Stuart Altman and David Shactman of  “Power, Politics, and Universal Health Care’’ on Monday  at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith. Altman, a Brandeis professor, has been bouncing back and forth between Waltham and Washington for years. He knows his stuff.

 

 

New look and new name for Nature Boston

So, the renamed Nature Boston is up and running. Check out this week’s calendar of event and a “Storify” post on last weeks visits by science journalist Carl Zimmer   He  was t the Coolidge Corner Theatre on talking about viruses at a screening of the film 12 Monkeys.

He also spoke at Harvard about his  book on science tattoos.

Also see a post on an event at Catalyst, a trendy new restaurant in Kendall Square with a back room named for Watson and Crick. The idea is to offer meeting space for the biotech and tech companies that have set up shop in the square.

Boston Globe editorial: Prostate screening limits “too sweeping”

A staff editorial in today’s Globe echoes comment made by prominent docs in town: The US Preventative Services Task Force went too far in calling for limits on prostate screening.

A better course would be for physicians to talk with their patients about both the uncertainties inherent in the PSA test and the relative innocuousness of most prostate cancers. Some patients may find the panel’s recommendation reason enough to forgo the test. Others patients might prefer to have it done, but to monitor their PSA levels rather than seek immediate treatment when the results are borderline.

Insurance companies often use the panel’s recommendations as their criterion for whether to cover a test. But until there’s a better test to detect prostate cancer or a broader consensus about skipping this one, insurers should continue to cover it.

Note that The New York Times editorial staff supports the limits and notes that the USPSTF guidelines allow for doctor patient conversations:

Critics, including urologists, who diagnose and treat prostate cancer, charge that the task force’s recommendations are misguided and will hurt patients. They have already been held up for two years lest they ignite charges of government rationing. That’s absurd. The recommendations are intended as guidance to help men and their doctors decide whether to use the test and how to react if it is positive. This is information patients need to know.       

 

Reading with Gawande

Atul Gawande talks to the Globe todayabout what he reads.  Love the answeron this one; not wild about the question.

Is there good writing about health and medicine by non-doctors?

I think some of the best writing. The doctor almost knows too much. One of the best pieces of writing about health care, to my mind, is “A Farewell to Arms’’ — a third of it takes place in an Italian hospital. Hemingway is unsparing and hilarious in his depiction of doctors and what it’s like to be a patient. Joan Didion’s book “The Year of Magical Thinking.’’ A book by Anne Fadiman, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.’’ These are extraordinary books.

The side effects of romantic comedies

Slightly off topic but fun: Globe movie reviewer Ty Burr uses a drug insert format –  including a list of side effects — to write about the film ”Love and other Drugs.” (FYI, he gives it two and a half stars.)

WARNING: Prolonged exposure to “Love & Other Drugs,’’ a romantic comedy-drama about the ups and downs of high-powered pharmaceutical salesman Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal), may result in the following side effects: Overwhelming sensations of slickness, loss of taste and other critical faculties, waxy plot buildup, severe supporting-character blockage, terminal-heroine syndrome, and impacted chick-flick cliches. Constipation and brain death may ensue.

Harvard Magazine on Atul Gawande

In my struggle to earn a  living as an independent journalist, I often wish I had a day job. But, maybe one a little less demanding than Dr. Gawande’s.  Here’s a  Harvardy profile.

The medical writing for which Gawande is best known represents only a small fraction of his professional output. He is a surgeon, and a busy one at that, performing 250-plus operations a year. He is a professor at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). He heads a World Health Organization initiative on making surgery safer. And he is a husband and a father of three.