Or Patient-Centered Cancer Care: IOM’s recommendations Last week, we looked at the recent Institute of Medicine’s report and wrote the post about “How the US Got Its Cancer Care Crisis“. This week we get more practical. With specific recommendations you can use! The general recommendations include: (1) becoming engaged patients. (2)...
Read More
Did you know… In a study conducted in 2012, 69% of patients diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and 81% of those diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer did not understand that chemotherapy was not at all likely to cure their cancer? That a national survey showed physicians asked patients what they want in their care only ½ the time? That patients ask...
Read More
So often people who undergo chemotherapy hear something like this from their family, friends or other well-wishers, “Thank goodness that’s over, now you can get on with your life. You can get back to normal.” Although it’s true that chemotherapy is over, the road that the patient is on is not smooth. There are important changes that caregivers and...
Read More
Growing up, Colleen Bronstein spent all summer at her family’s summer home at the beach and when she married they had a pool and visited the beach house twice a year. Fair skinned, freckled and Irish she loved the outdoors. Knowing the Signs “I had an itchy spot on my back for a year or so and when I went to see my family doctor about something...
Read More
As a nice complement to our prior post about Diabetes and Nanotechnologies, Pamela Brooke of “Associates Degree in Nursing Guide” web site suggested we might want to share also this cool infographic summarizing the current status of nanomedicine. We found it well done and helpful – thanks! Image compliments of Associates Degree in...
Read More
There are two phrases making the rounds that describe you, a member of the growing Medivizor.com community. One is “e-patient” and the other is “smart patient.” What is an e-patient? Who created the phrase? Published in March of 1996, Health Online: How to Find Health Information, Support Groups, and Self-Help Communities in Cyberspace, first...
Read More
Almost 10 years ago, secondhand smoke was determined to be a Group A carcinogen by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Since then evidence has grown supporting this classification. The reasoning is based on the content of secondhand smoke (SHS). SHS is a mixture of fine particles and over 50 chemicals that are known or probable cancer causing...
Read More
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. …live in the question.” —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet Leeching or blood letting was part of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Instead of a lancet, leeches were placed on various parts of the body to slowly remove blood. Leech farms,...
Read More
You may not believe it but there are times during surgery when smoke is released into the air. What? TMI? (too much information?) Well actually, there is information in that smoke. There are surgical procedures that involve what is called electrosurgical dissection, electricity flows through the surgical knife and “cauterizes” as it cuts. During...
Read More
So I’m staying at a cost-effective hotel to save Medivizor $s. It’s the Comfort Inn on W 71st St., New York. It’s a very basic hotel, but it’s location is convenient to many places in town. Anyway, when I say cost-effective, I mean (among other things) that the dining room for breakfast is so small and crowded there’s a...
Read More
Reviewing history fascinates, educates and can really make you appreciate. That’s what happens when reading about life in the 1800s and early 1900s. Mystery Meat? In 1904, the meat packer’s union in Chicago went on strike. At the time four companies ruled the meat-packing world. To end the strike, the companies brought in replacement workers. ...
Read More
The Navajo Sugar Monster Long ago the Holy People predicted that a monster would take over the Navajos. Our mothers and fathers would change…No longer were man and woman together. One after another this monster ate away their faces. It gnawed away Navajo identity….Everything turned from light to dark….Words ceased to exist. The Holy People begin to...
Read More
