Clinical care for Obesity and Diet Related illnesses needs more attention to Societal Determinants of Health Article from NEJM website about how despite rates of obesity starting to level off overall, the lowest income and minority populations continue to show a sharp increase. A focus on those factors as contributory needs to be a part of the discussion.
Social stigma makes the opioid crisis hard to confront (7min) There are many reasons why the opioid crisis is so hard to confront. One of them is social stigma. It often extends beyond users themselves, to their families. People see addiction as a moral weakness, and by extension, the moral weakness of their families.
When drinking ruins your liver - should you qualify for a transplant? When patients develop alcohol liver disease, they are often forced to wait 6 months to prove they can abstain from alcohol before they will be considered for a transplant. Is that a fair amount of time? Is that a fair practice at all?
Withholding surgery: How gaps in policy fail people who inject drugs A recent New York Times article described a harrowing situation faced by some people who inject drugs and develop endocarditis, a life-threatening infection caused by bacteria that enter the bloodstream and settle in the heart. The article described doctors in Tennessee deciding whether to perform repeat costly heart surgeries on patients who were re-infected with endocarditis as a result of ongoing illicit drug use—and at times declining to operate. There are policy failures that are to blame, too, for how and why resources are allocated this way. This looks at those failures and how our bias influences both the policies and how they are applied.
Injecting Drugs can ruin a heart - how many second chances should a user get? A life-threatening heart infection afflicts a growing number of people who inject opioids or meth. Costly surgery can fix it, but the addiction often goes unaddressed.
Can Your Child’s Identity Shape Yours? by Andrew Solomon Listen to Andrew Soloman’s ideas about how one can find profound meaning in differences and how they can shape one’s identity. “As long as you experience your condition as an illness, it’s your prison. Once you experience it as an identity it’s the source of your freedom.”
We Need a Heroic Narrative for Death by Amanda Bennett A powerful talk arguing that having hope for a happy ending of a loved one’s life does not warrant a diagnosis of “denial.” A call to match the heroic narratives we have in life with a heroic narrative for death.
Culture of Dying - Justin Ritchie and Seth Moser-Katz interview Stephen Jenkinson Resilience.org interviews Stephen Jackson about our cultural difficulty with death and how to overcome it.
"Erasing Death" Explores the Science of Resuscitation by Sam Parnia, M.D. Dr. Sam Parnia, a critical care doctor and director of resuscitation research at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine, studies what people experience between the moment that their heart stops beating and after they have been resuscitated.
Can Your Child’s Identity Shape Yours? by Andrew Solomon Listen to Andrew Soloman’s ideas about how one can find profound meaning in differences and how they can shape one’s identity. “As long as you experience your condition as an illness, it’s your prison. Once you experience it as an identity it’s the source of your freedom.”
We Need a Heroic Narrative for Death by Amanda Bennett A powerful talk arguing that having hope for a happy ending of a loved one’s life does not warrant a diagnosis of “denial.” A call to match the heroic narratives we have in life with a heroic narrative for death.
Culture of Dying - Justin Ritchie and Seth Moser-Katz interview Stephen Jenkinson Resilience.org interviews Stephen Jackson about our cultural difficulty with death and how to overcome it.
"Erasing Death" Explores the Science of Resuscitation by Sam Parnia, M.D. Dr. Sam Parnia, a critical care doctor and director of resuscitation research at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine, studies what people experience between the moment that their heart stops beating and after they have been resuscitated.
Letting Go by Atul Gawande, M.D. What should healthcare do when it can’t save your life?