Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Killer Apps

February 4, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
A screenshot from the SkinVision app

Smartphones, like Swiss Army knives and SkyMall watches, have a few nifty features and plenty of useless ones. Who needs a checkbook when you’ve got Square, a toolkit when you’ve got iHandy Level, or a babysitter when you’ve got Fruit Ninja? Encyclopedias, gazetteers, even boredom itself now seems obsolete. Are dermatologists next? A slew of skin cancer-detection apps—with names like SkinVision, SpotCheck, and Mole Detective 2—allow smartphone users to photograph and “analyze” their worrisome blemishes, offering diagnoses such as “problematic,” “high risk,” and ... Read More

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The Hardest Conversation, Part 2

October 29, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Late-stage cancer patients often don’t understand that chemotherapy isn’t a cure but a palliative, as Kevin Charles Redmon told us last week. New research shared at the annual meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology today finds a similar trajectory for those receiving radiation treatments for incurable lung cancer. Some 64 percent of the 384 patients with stage III or IV lung cancer surveyed said they thought palliative radiation therapy they had received might help cure their cancer. That echoes the study Redmon cited last week, in which 69 percent of lung cancer ... Read More

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The Hardest Conversation: Talking About Death

October 25, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

There is a pandemic in the United States that no single-payer health care system, marvel of modern technology, nor homeopathic tincture can remedy. Medicare doesn’t cover it, and no blockbuster drug will treat it. Call it a “silent crisis.” Symptoms include, chiefly, poor communication between doctor and patient, false hope, and a willingness to move heaven and earth in the final months of life to find a cure where there is none. Prognosis is death without dignity. That life is an ultimately fatal condition is inescapable—death is perhaps the only truly universal human experience. ... Read More

More like this: Findings, Health
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Have You Heard the One About the Guy with Prostate Cancer?

June 25, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Man talking to therapist

When I was a graduate student in psychology, I worked at a cancer center. One of my responsibilities was to meet with new patients as they received, drip by drip over many hours, chemotherapy infusions. In one corner of the clinic, a woman I’ll call Lisa was battling breast cancer. Lisa’s friends had organized a complex and complete support tree for her, with meal delivery, dog walking, child care, and bill paying. Lisa snuggled into a quilt they had stitched for her. Lisa was never alone. Nearby sat “Rick,” a sinewy, divorced man in his early 60s, fresh from his latest surgery for ... Read More

More like this: Health, July-August 2012
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Cancer Wars: An Outcast Researcher’s New Theory

April 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
ps-Duesberg

Compact and white-haired at 75, Peter Duesberg has wide-set blue eyes magnified by corrective lenses as thick as his German accent. He is the picture of a courtly Old World scientist. But Duesberg is given to through-the-looking-glass scientific theories, the most recent of which, about the origins of cancer, could turn an accepted truth of molecular biology on its head. Viruses like hepatitis C don’t cause cancer, he says, and neither do collections of mutated genes — as nearly every other scientist believes. Instead, he argues, cancer arises when the number and appearance of a cell’s ... Read More

More like this: Health, May-June 2012
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Can the Walnut Help Cure Prostate Cancer?

April 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

A cup of walnuts holds 117 percent of the fat you need in a day. This fact prompted Paul Davis, a professor at UC Davis (no relation), to approach the California Walnut Board for funding. Davis (the man, not the university) wanted to feed the nuts to lab mice. The research nutritionist had seen studies that connected fatty diets and prostate cancer. And he knew federal guidelines recommend we limit our fat intake to less than 30 percent of our calorie intake. But, he says, he’s also “convinced, given the epidemiological evidence, that the Mediterranean diet, which is high in nuts and ... Read More

More like this: Health, Today in Mice
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Fending Off Skin Cancer With SPF Starbucks

April 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Not quite a prescription for a Red Bull and a bike ride, but a new study finds that highly caffeinated mice who get plenty of exercise seem to be at less risk of developing skin cancer from too much sun exposure. Add to that, mice who drink caffeine-laced water and spend time on their running wheel see less tissue inflammation (always a handy measure of general unhealthiness), according to Yao-Ping Lu, a Rutgers University researcher who presented his study at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting in Chicago. Following up on other studies that suggest caffeine ... Read More

More like this: Health, Today in Mice
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Is Radiation Actually Good For Some of Us?

February 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
goes here

Meet Reference Man, a kind of hypothetical Ken Doll: a 20-something white male, fit and hearty, out in the park doing a hundred one-armed pushups every morning at 5:30. He’s the guy most radiation exposure standards are designed to protect. But as a stand-in, he’s passé. Reference Man was born when most of the evidence about the health effects of radiation came from high-dose exposures such as nuclear bombs. But the landscape has changed. Exposure now comes from low and often chronic levels of radiation such as medical technologies, which are the fastest-growing source of radiation ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, March-April 2012, Science
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Researchers Re-Open Their Minds to Psychedelic Drugs

May 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Mike is hunched over a pile of soggy wood chips at the bottom of a glade in Golden Gate Park. It's a clear winter afternoon and sunlight filters through the eucalyptus trees, landing on grass still damp from a recent storm. Mike sifts through the wood chips, slowly and deliberately examining the soil beneath. Two paper bags fill a pocket of his Patagonia fleece jacket. Mike is a 28-year-old engineer at a prominent software company in San Francisco. He is soft-spoken and self-possessed; on weekends he drives his Subaru Forester to his time-share in Tahoe to ski. He donates to public radio, ... Read More

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Breast Cancer Court Case Pits Patients’ Genes vs. Gene Patents

April 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard a case earlier this week involving a fine point of patent law with major implications for public health and science: Can individual human genes be patented by private companies? The United States Patent and Trademark Office has, in fact, been saying yes for years. According to one 2005 study published by the journal Science, gene patents for 20 percent of the human genome — or more than 4,000 genes — have been created, despite court precedent that says no one can own the "products of nature." This particular case, ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, The Idea Lobby
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