 Photo: OliBac I saw a patient the other week who complained of intolerable hot flashes for the last several months. They were happening day and night, often awakening her from sleep, and after a series of questions, I realized they were significantly interfering with the quality of her life. So I suggested she begin hormone-replacement therapy. “What about the increased risk of breast cancer?” she asked, alarmed. Continue reading…  Photo: Tim Green When I was an intern in internal medicine, I admitted a patient to my service with pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is a bad one; back then, only ten percent of patients with it would be alive within five years after being diagnosed. My patient was a farmer in the full bloom of late middle-age health when he began rapidly losing weight. Continue reading…  Photo: erix! Some people have the misfortune to have been born to abusive parents who belittled them and prevented them from developing a healthy self-esteem. Others are born predisposed to view themselves in a negative light because of their physical appearance, a disability, or for no reason anyone, including themselves, knows. Research has consistently supported the notion that it’s difficult to be happy without liking oneself. But how can one learn to like oneself when one doesn’t? Continue reading…  Photo: kevindooley We humans are often distinguished from other animals by our ability to make and use tools. We got things rolling with the wheel and haven’t stopped since. Now we have supercranes to build skyscrapers, cars and airplanes to move us from here to there, and screwdrivers to put things together. The problem we find isn’t a lack of tools; it’s that we often use the wrong tool or no tool at all and end up struggling far more than necessary to accomplish the task at hand. When obstacles seem insurmountable or just harder to slog through than we think they should be, often the problem is simply that we’re using the wrong tool. Continue reading…  Photo: tawalker Several weeks ago, I was editing together some video footage for a home movie and was surprised to discover how irritated, negative, and just plain mean I sounded when talking to my wife. I remember most of the interactions that were filmed but not any of the feelings I was quite clearly projecting. In one segment, my wife was trying out a tripod and having trouble figuring out how to use it correctly. “You’re holding it wrong,” I snapped sharply. “That’s not right at all!” Continue reading…  Photo: Steve Snodgrass First aid is defined as the immediate care given to an acutely injured or ill person. It can literally be life-saving so it behooves all of us to know some basic principles. What follows are some rules that cover common conditions and general practices: Continue reading…  Photo: Robert S. Donovan I once made a determination to call a friend on the phone every day for one year. He was new to the practice of Nichiren Buddhism and struggling with a misery of an intensity I’d rarely seen. Anxiety and depression were overwhelming him and ruining the quality of his everyday life. I’d hoped to encourage him by leveraging some discipline of my own. Most days we’d talk for under two minutes. My goal wasn’t to engage him in a lengthy and significant dialogue every day, which would have been exhausting to us both, but rather simply to remind him I was there and to try to bolster his determination to do something that he said he wanted to do and that I thought would help resolve his suffering. Continue reading…  Photo: scubadive67 WARNING: The time required to read this post will violate my five-minute rule—by a wide margin. This isn’t so much to punish readers for my decision to read all 1,163 pages of the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (HR3590) and all 337 pages of the “Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010″ (HR4872)—known collectively as the health care law—but rather because a shorter post couldn’t possibly do an analysis of it justice (not that a longer post will either, but here goes…). Continue reading…  Photo: Cl@re Bear A few years ago, a patient of mine was diagnosed with lung cancer. A metastatic work up revealed a small mass in his liver that had the radiographic appearance of a benign liver cyst. But in the setting of a newly diagnosed lung cancer, we couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a metastatic lesion, so we decided to biopsy it. Due to scheduling issues, we couldn’t get it done for seven days. Two days into the seven, he called me in a panic over the possibility that the lesion in his liver was cancer, a fact, if true, he understood would change his prognosis from good to dismal. I offered him a prescription for Valium, which he accepted gratefully, and then suggested a strategy to help him manage his anxiety that took him by surprise: denial. Continue reading…  Photo: fontplaydotcom I’ve chosen three questions from readers to discuss in this week’s post. To those who sent me these questions, please recognize my answers are by necessity general as I obviously don’t know you personally nor the details of the situations you wrote about. I do hope my answers can provide you new ways to think about the problems you’re facing as well as provide other readers useful perspectives on similar situations they may be facing in their own lives, but please don’t mistake any of the following for my professional medical advice. Continue reading… |
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