Word: patients
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...most agonizing choices a patient with a life-threatening illness has to make is when to put quality of life ahead of length of life. Case in point: chemotherapy after breast-cancer surgery. Although the side effects of chemo (among them nausea, fatigue and hair loss) can be brutal, the treatment does work: patients who go through it will, on average, live longer. So I was surprised to read in the current issue of Annals of Internal Medicine that only 29% of breast-cancer patients actually take their doctor's advice and get chemotherapy after surgery. Even more striking...
Researchers seeking to answer those questions come up against a confounding mess of variables--everything from changing hormone levels to a patient's willingness to admit that a problem exists. But last summer a researcher at Stanford University tried to wave away some of the fog. Turhan Canli showed nearly 100 photographs--some of emotionally neutral objects like a fire hydrant, others of emotionally unsettling things like a severed hand--to 12 men and 12 women. Three weeks later he showed the subjects the same images and found that the women were 15% more likely to have accurately remembered...
...scans represent a major advance over the simple X ray, which did not allow doctors to visualize brain tissue at all. Instead of a flat, two-dimensional X-ray picture, CT scanners produce a series of successive images. Taken as the patient, lying down, moves through a scanning ring, these "slices" can be combined to create the illusion of depth. The resulting pictures of bone and soft tissue can help doctors distinguish between patients with a psychiatric disorder and those with head trauma (which can trigger similar symptoms). CTs have been particularly useful in identifying schizophrenia patients. In the 1970s...
...something so widely desired, so hotly derided, happiness hasn't got much attention from researchers. One reason is the difficulty of quantifying happiness: it is a condition that is diagnosed and defined not by the doctor but by the patient. Another is the medical community's tendency to study pathology, not normality. "In spite of its name and its charter," Seligman avers, "the National Institute of Mental Health has always been the National Institute of Mental Illness." He notes that when the NIMH was created in 1947, "academics found that they could get grants if their research was about curing...
...Vestiges of censorship in China and the blockbuster-driven nature of the publishing business encourage many Chinese authors to write knockoffs of foreign best-sellers. The copycat phenomenon is called dache (free ride) in publishing circles. Once Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient became a best-seller, writers quickly composed books with similar themes, calling them The Beijing Patient or The Chinese Patient. After Marguerite Duras' The Lover turned into a hot book, Beijing Lover, Singaporean Lover, Hong Kong Lover and English Lover-all written by women-soon saturated the market...