The Last Word

By: | February 15, 2014

loon2February 10 – 14

In the wake of this week’s mammogram research, Christie said it’s no longer a question that increasing the number of cancers detected is the wrong objective: “we should be aiming to save lives, not create as many cancer patients as we possibly can“.

Cassie looked back on scientists acting as their own guinea pigs, and found Jonas Salk’s vaccine test especially shocking.

When guest poster Jennifer Holland found no clear explanation for every twinge and pang of aging, she also discovered that trying too hard to find one takes you to a very dark place.

Jessa mourned the drowning loons.

And Richard told us what Galileo had in common with the Beatles.

Breast cancer’s latest saga: misfearing and misplaced goalposts

By: | February 13, 2014

AirmanMastectomy

What’s the number one killer of women? It’s a question that practitioners asked every new patient at a clinic where physician Lisa Rosenbaum once worked, and she hasn’t forgotten the answer given to her by one middle-aged woman with high blood pressure and elevated blood lipids. “I know the right answer is heart disease,” the patient told Rosenbaum, “But I’m still going to say ‘breast cancer.’”

Rosenbaum recounts this experience in a perspective published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine, which follows on the heels of a long-term study published online Tuesday in BMJ that found no benefit from screening mammography. The two papers make fine companions.

The Rosenbaum commentary explores a phenomenon that Cass Sunstein dubbed “misfearing” — our human nature to fear instinctively, rather than factually. Her patient’s first answer is correct — heart disease kills more women than all cancers combined, and yet breast cancer seems to invoke far more fear among most women. “What is it about being at risk for heart disease that is emotionally dissonant for women?,” Rosenbaum asks. “Might we view heart disease as the consequence of having done something bad, whereas to get breast cancer is to have something bad happen to you?” Continue reading →

The beleaguered loon

By: | February 12, 2014

Loon 1In the autumn of 1996, my daily walk to school took more than an hour, but I didn’t mind. It brought me from the shores of Ramsey Lake in Sudbury, Ontario, through a bright birch forest where everything was whishy and dappled and stripy-white. Blueberry bushes lined the path.

A birch tree alone is a beautiful thing, stark against the darker trees, but a whole forest of birch monoculture is matched in its strange artificiality only by the eerie verticality of a bamboo forest.

Artificial it was. Before they raised the smokestacks in 1972, the local nickel mine’s activities had rained sulphuric acid on the local lakes until all the native vegetation was gone. The place was like a moonscape.

After twenty years it had regenerated to the point where plants that loved acidic soil – birch and blueberries – had begun to thrive. But still the fish stocks were depleted and the Common loon, whose 30-year lifespan makes for slow reproduction, was still limping back into residence.

A little loon goes a long way, though, and I can still bring to mind the avian voice that projected across the lake most nights. I could write its call on sheet music if I knew the notation for quarter-tones. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Painful Lessons

By: | February 11, 2014

abdominal pain

It used to go like this: The nice doctor smiles and checks your heart, ears, and knees, pronounces you healthy, and off you go. Grab a lollipop on your way out! (Doctors used to have candy jars. Dentists used to give out toothbrushes.)  You are not yet 20! Life is good!

Then suddenly you’ve flown past 30. Cried over 40. Crept up on 45. And now, anything can happen.

Like this: I was having pain under my ribs for days. I finally went to the ER. Pancreatitis? Really? I had a follow-up MRI, because pancreatitis is for old alcoholic men; I was a tiny 43-year-old woman who can barely finish a beer. On results day, I perched on the edge of a big rolling chair as the doctor made an invisible circle on the computer screen with his capped pen. Here is your pancreas, he said of one mystery blob. And here—tapping a shadow on the blob—is the mass on your pancreas.

A mass on my pancreas. Continue reading →

Polio and a Father’s Certainty

By: | February 10, 2014

Salk_headlinesA couple of weeks ago, I was researching the history of polio vaccination, and I stumbled across a photo that stopped me cold. There was Jonas Salk, the researcher who developed the polio vaccine we use in the US today, giving his son a shot. The caption reads: “Peter Salk receiving the inactivated poliovirus vaccine from his father, Jonas Salk. Salk also injected himself, his wife, and his two other sons. The vaccine was still experimental at this point.” And it wasn’t just Salk. Julius Youngner, who worked in the lab with Salk, told the Daily News in 1980, that he had given it to his children as well, and that all the lab members had been vaccinated. “You can’t ask other people to take it if you don’t give it to your own children,” he told the reporter. “People offered their children as volunteers.” Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | February 8, 2014

einstein-l3 – 7 February

This week, Richard visits a museum that starts with a ship and ends at the universe.

It’s not rocket science: Roberta explains again why, no, seriously, you need to put your phone away while you’re driving (you too, cyclists).

Ann recounts the horrors of living in New Madrid, Missouri, a town on an ancient rift being torn in an ancient continental plate.

Have you ever tossed and turned at night, wondering which incarnation of Sherlock Holmes you most resemble? Sleep easy thanks to Michelle.

Surveying the parched California landscape, Cameron considers the reserves — both beneath the ground and within ourselves — that will bring things back to the way they were.

On Tap, Special Reserve

By: | February 7, 2014

California_Drought_Dry_Riverbed_2009If you were a kid in the eighties in California, you might have done things like this: Save the bathwater and flush the toilets with it. Turn off the shower when you soaped up. Let it mellow. You might have even had a Rube Goldberg-like contraption like the one my dad made to use water from the washing machine for the plants. Maybe, like me, you got embarrassed when you saw the signs that read “Save Water. Shower with a friend!” We were all drought experts then. In my freshman dorm, my roommate even policed other people’s sinks while they brushed their teeth.

Only then the drought was over. And it’s been so easy to forget. Continue reading →

Why I’ve Become a Distracted Driving Bore

By: | February 5, 2014

shutterstock_152529914Lately, I’ve become a nag. I reprimanded my husband for fiddling with the navigation on his smartphone while he was driving. I chastised a friend who said she talked on her speakerphone on the road and another who admitted to texting while “only going 30 miles an hour.” Last weekend, I looked up a bunch of research and statistics on distracted driving and emailed the information to a few friends with the enticing preface “So I think you have all heard me get on my soapbox at some point about cell phone use while driving. I am going to get on it again…”

I’m not sure why distracted driving ticks me off so much. Maybe it’s my distaste for a device-obsessed culture in which people can’t stand to miss even one call, or annoyance at hearing too many loud cell phone conversations in public places. But I think what bugs me is that almost everyone does it, even though most people know on some level that it’s not okay. It’s become a normal, accepted part of coping with our busy lives.

Continue reading →