Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Waiting for a Miracle

May 21, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
religious-care

People with advanced cancer tend to get more aggressive care at the end of life and spend more time in the intensive care unit if they receive spiritual support from their religious communities, according to a new study. The report's lead researcher said that finding was "quite the opposite" of what her team was expecting—in part because of evidence that spiritual support coming from within a patient's medical team leads to less aggressive care and more use of hospice. In the new study, spiritual patients who reported high levels of support from their religious communities were two to ... Read More

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We Are Not the Sum Total of Our Parts

May 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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America is obsessed with beauty and perfection. Most Americans emerge into adulthood only after surviving a childhood packed full of skin-deep assumptions about one another. Once we’re adults, many of us seek to find situations in life that allow us to keep these shallow attitudes at bay. But this “normal” life is not an option for the American actor. While the cool kids and the nerds join up and work together (and see tables turned) in most workplaces and communities, the national popular culture we share is often as immature as our sixth-grade selves. Like many American stars, ... Read More

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Where Have All the Doctors Gone?

January 9, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Technically, all Judy Sweet needs is a blood pressure test. In most doctors’ offices, this would be an in-and-out visit. Sweet’s doctor, however, never rushes her patients. Mary Elizabeth Sokach is a primary-care provider based in Exeter Township, a rural Pennsylvania community about 15 miles west of Scranton. When Sokach walks into the room, she greets Sweet like an old friend, then examines her closely. She asks when Sweet last had an eye exam. (“She’s a phenomenal artist, so we have to keep her hands and her vision going,” explains Sokach.) And she talks to Sweet about sleep and ... Read More

More like this: Health, January-February 2012, Magazine Feature Story
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Why I Quit Primary Care: One Doctor’s Story

October 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Why I Quit Primary Care: One Doctor's Story

By most measures, Frederick M. Barken, M.D.,  was a success as a primary care doctor. He ran a solo practice in rural upstate New York with 3,000 patients; he was well respected, and he earned a comfortable income. But after 25 years, at the relatively young age of 51, he'd had enough. In his new book, Out of Practice: Fighting for Primary Care Medicine in America, Barken tells how he was driven out by the extraordinary demands of a frail and befuddled elderly clientele in the era of "fast food" medical care. It wasn't just the nonmedical requirements of the job that got to him, like ... Read More

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An Etiquette Book for Patients and Caregivers

March 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

As far as my chemo nurse Olga* is concerned, I can do nothing right. She scolded me for sending an e-mail when she thought I should have called, and vice versa. She scolded me for going home before my next appointment was scheduled. She scolded me for asking to speak to her personally instead of whichever nurse was available. She scolded me for calling my oncologist directly. She scolded me for asking whether my clinical information and questions are shared between my oncologist and the staff of the chemo suite. I could go on … “Funny,” I think to myself. “If she had told me the ... Read More

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Dicker With Your Doc? Not So Fast…

January 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
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"How to Haggle With Your Doctor” was the title of a recent Business section column in The New York Times. This is one of many similar directives to the public (as seen here, here, here and here) urging us to lower the high price of our health care by going mano a mano with our physicians about the price of tests they recommend and the drugs they prescribe. Such articles provide simple, common-sense recommendations about how to respond to the urgency many of us feel — insured or uninsured — to reduce our health care expenses. With unemployment at 9.4 percent and more than 50 million ... Read More

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More Can Also Be Less in Medical Effectiveness

December 10, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

When the public turns its attention to medical effectiveness research, as Miller-McCune.com did earlier this fall, ("For Dying Cancer Patients, Geography is Destiny") a discussion often follows about how this research might restrict access to new medical innovations. But this focus obscures the vital role that effectiveness research will play in evaluating current medical and surgical care. I am now slogging through chemotherapy for stomach cancer, probably the result of high doses of radiation for Hodgkin lymphoma in the early 1970s, which was the standard treatment until long-term side ... Read More

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‘House,’ ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Violate Codes of Conduct?

June 25, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Next time the brilliant Dr. House resuscitates a patient using a pair of tweezers, household twine and the foil from a chewing gum wrapper, you're right to be skeptical. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics analyzed a full season of two hugely popular medical shows — ABC's Grey's Anatomy and Fox's House — and discovered that the dramas were "rife" with incidents that violated professional codes of conduct. Analyzing the second seasons of the shows, researcher Matthew Czarny pinpointed 179 depictions of bioethical dilemmas, ranging from issues surrounding ... Read More

More like this: July-August 2010, Media, The Cocktail Napkin
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Doctored Information

October 8, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

A new study concludes that carefully crafted informed consent laws, rather than discouraging women to forgo an abortion, have zero impact on the amount of abortions performed in the states that choose to mandate these "scary briefings." California State University, Long Beach, Economist Marshall H. Medoff, who has written a variety of studies on women's issues, finds that the four areas of informed consent laws (possibilities of negative mental health associations, increased possibility of breast cancer, increased chance of infertility and images of fetal pain) intended to dissuade women ... Read More

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How Much Does It Hurt?

September 17, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Sometimes, it's simple to measure the effects of medical treatment: A patient recovers from the flu or she doesn't. Cancer cells disappear or they return. Yet many conversations between doctor and patient yield less-than-scientific answers — intangible descriptions, such as the amount of pain a person is in or how much a drug amplifies his drowsiness. Because researchers employ incongruous tools to measure the unmeasurable, a group of clinical studies devoted to a disease might seem like they were written in different languages. To address this problem, David Cella wants to create the ... Read More

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