Reading Time: 7 minutes Last year, I wrote about the crisis in Alzheimer’s research: a cruel affair involving a research direction and course of treatment built in part on papers with doctored data, and the heated venture-capitalist backstory that complicated the virtuosity of whistle-blowers. More recently, authors attempted to defend the original data, but the defenses were often just […]
medicine
Posted inHealthcare
A colonoscopy probably saved my life—but not from colorectal cancer
Reading Time: 5 minutes If reports about a new European study that questions the effectiveness of colonoscopies are causing you to question whether you should get one, don’t let them. I make this recommendation due to my own life-changing personal experience with that undignified cancer-detecting procedure more than a year ago. If the routine, every-5-years colonoscopy I underwent in […]
Posted inScience
Alzheimer’s latest drug and science journalism’s memory problem
Reading Time: 6 minutes In July, the medical community was rocked by a disappointing reminder of science’s weakest link: the humans doing the work. The journal Science had shared that its six-month investigation supported the findings of whistleblower Matthew Schrag, who first noted altered images in a high-impact paper on Alzheimer’s, published in Nature in 2006. That paper is […]
Posted inBiology
How soon we forget: Vaccines are life
Reading Time: 4 minutes Vaccines have saved tens of millions of lives already, and more are coming soon that promise to deliver us from the worst killers of humanity.
Posted inRacial justice
‘Ask how the Americans did it’: How racial bias in US medicine inspired Hitler and persists today
Reading Time: 8 minutes The California state investigation into racial bias in healthcare only scratches the surface of a deeply-ingrained system.
Posted inSex & Sexuality
Getting to know and love your vaginal fluids
Reading Time: 4 minutes If you’ve ever gone inside a large supermarket or pharmacy in the U.S., no doubt you’ve seen products labeled “feminine hygiene.” But have you stopped to ask what is supposedly unhygienic about women’s reproductive parts? It turns out, there are a lot of misunderstandings about vaginas and vulvas. Even the terms can be confusing: vagina […]
Posted inHealth
In praise of humanity: How I survived my brain tumor without religion
Reading Time: 8 minutes The first sign something was wrong was during lunch with friends in my senior year of high school. I was eating French fries one moment, and the next I heard my friend Mindi saying, “Liz! Liz! Why did you say that?” She looked befuddled and concerned. I had no clue what she was talking about. […]
Posted inHealthcare
Slowing to listen at the end of life
Reading Time: 12 minutes Marcia sat up on the side of the bed, a hand on each knee, and braced herself as she leaned forward to open the space in her chest for more air. At 52, she was dying of ovarian cancer that had spread to her liver. The critical organ had failed, causing excess fluid to gather […]
Posted inHealth
There’s no such thing as routine surgery, except yes there is
Reading Time: 3 minutes On a March Wednesday in 1653, a 20-year-old Londoner named Sam Pepys lay spreadeagled, four limbs tied to bedposts, screaming. He was drunker than usual for nine in the morning, and for good reason: Sam was having surgery to remove a bladder stone. He was having 17th-century surgery, the only kind available in his day. Joseph Lister was […]
Posted inHealth
Narrative medicine: Why stories matter in healthcare
Reading Time: 5 minutes There was a low rumble in the room. I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying above the din, but I feel the excitement in my body even now as my memory-neurons fire. This new batch of future doctors was about to enter terrain more daunting than the fundamentals of pharmacology: They would read a poem […]