Anniversaries are important dates. They mark the return of the Earth to its previous position against the firmament – the completion of a year – they give us the opportunity to reflect on events that were important in our lives, on their significance, and how these events have affected us. March 11 – this Sunday [...]
Consider a hypothetical world in which there are four equally possible causes of death – cancer, heart disease, infectious disease, and accidents. Now imagine that, through a miracle of medicine and public health we were to eliminate all deaths from infectious disease – what would happen to our causes of death? All else being equal, [...]
My Great-Uncle Harvey was the only physician I knew as a kid. He delivered my father, my aunt, me, and my sister; he visited me in the hospital when I had my tonsils out; gave us our shots; and attended to all of the other minutiae of keeping us all healthy. In fact, it wasn’t [...]
There’s nothing like a good fright to spark people into action. Tell someone that they need to have a triple bypass and they’re likely to finally get around to exercise and healthy eating; diagnose a person with lung cancer and they might finally stop smoking. A good enough scare can get people to stop drinking, [...]
In the first radiological news story of 2012 Bed, Bath, & Beyond announced on January 12 that it had received a shipment of steel tissue holders (manufactured in India) that were contaminated with radioactive cobalt-60. As of this writing it is not quite certain exactly where the Co-60 came from, although there are some guesses (more [...]
Well, the world is still here. It didn’t end on May 21 as predicted by Harold Camping and it also didn’t end on the date of his revised prophecy – October 21. For those who were sober enough to notice, the world also failed to end at the dawn of the new millennium, just as [...]
One of my favorite movies is Ferris Buehler’s Day Off, and one of my favorite scenes is at the Art Institute of Chicago. Beginning with a close-up of a bunch of dots of paint, the camera zooms out to show, first, a low-resolution face and, eventually, a painting (“Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La [...]
By Dr. Y In 1987, scrap metal scavengers in Goiania, Brazil, a city of about a million people, found a strange machine in an abandoned cancer clinic. Salvaging and dismantling the device, they found a small and enigmatic metal cylinder that aroused their curiosity – opening it up they found a fine blue powder. What [...]
This last April I traveled with two colleagues to Japan to help train physicians from the Tokushukai Medical Assistance Team (TMAT) - we gave a total of 8 lectures to over 1200 physicians and emergency responders during our visit, discussing how to safely care for patients who might have been exposed to radiation or who might [...]
Fight or flight is one of our most primal reflexes – faced with a potential danger we tend to turn one way to confront it or the other way to flee to safety. Fighting was not an option for the public in the aftermath of the accidents in Fukushima and Chernobyl – just as it [...]