She was, and is, a close and cherished friend. Someone decided she had Alzheimer’s. At least somebody said she did. She had wonderful plans for retirement. Now the retirement community she had been dreaming of did not seem to want her and her husband around. She has just made the decision (I don’t know with who’s help) that it is a better idea she does not drive. She would surely not remember the details of how the diagnosis was made. I wonder if it had been made properly. Probably not.
Filed under Aging, Alternative Medicine, Alzheimer's Disease, Diagnosis, Disease by on Jan 9th, 2017. Comment. 
Lady Gaga had to cancel some shows because she has Synovitis. Can you get that from wearing raw meat? Just checkin’. Actually, I know a little something about this. Synovitis, I mean. Not the wearing meat part; I much prefer to eat mine.
Go back to me at 18. Yes, I know it was a long time ago. But there are some things you do not forget, like my first days in the emergency room at the ancient and venerated Massachusetts General Hospital. It had been open since 1811. I read the log; the first patient was a French sailor — ships could dock at the front door, then — with what was politely referred to as a “social disease.” It was a work-study job assigned to me as an undergraduate, allegedly pre-med, at the sprawling Boston University. They laughed when I said I was going to be a doctor. I took people’s wallets from their pockets, looking for identification and insurance cards and I was good at that nefarious profession. I loved the moments when it was quiet up front and I could sneak back to an operating or treatment room, stealing a generally useless tidbit of medical knowledge. Such tidbits seemed so precious then. I remember sneaking back to the cast room when a handsome, muscled, orthopedic surgeon was casting a leg. He was laughing at me, like everyone else. He told me to ask him questions. The lady with fake blond hair, whom he was casting, was laughing, too. “Go ahead, honey. Ask him questions.” I asked him, I guess she hurt her knee. “How do you know how high up and how low down to build the cast?” Above and below the injury. Knees were kind of a mess, but you always worried about the articulations above and below. The orthopedist was not particularly articulate. I started thinking that any idiot could be one, and medical school should not be that hard to get into. I thanked him and turned to leave when he hit me with something I have never forgotten. “Casts are easy. Broken bones are easy. The tough stuff is soft tissue. Nobody knows a damned thing about soft tissue injuries. They act like they do, but they don’t.” I repeated my thanks, and felt bad that I had to slip back to the front desk and the business of who people were and who paid for all this. Read more on Lady Gaga’s Synovitis…
Filed under Diagnosis, medicine, News by on Feb 22nd, 2013. Comment.
I don’t think I know anyone who can say they’ve never had a headache. And some have them often enough that they’re given about as much attention as a hiccup or a sneeze. But sometimes, a headache can be more than a headache.
I was in Minneapolis doing a rotation in neurology through a university headache clinic. A lot of people were referred through primary care physicians and some even from other neurologists. They were strange headaches to them, but headaches that were frequently seen by these university neurologists in Minneapolis.
I remember seeing a professional football player who had cluster headaches with such intense pain that it brought him to tears. There were many middle aged and older people, but there’s one girl I remember in particular. She was 23 years old and was given to me to see with no pre-screening. Read more on Headache or Tumor…
Filed under Brain, Diagnosis, Doctors by on Oct 2nd, 2012. 1 Comment.
I was a 2nd year resident in neurological surgery when there was news that a single neuron could link with a single computer wire and messages could travel from the one to the other. Nobody in my doctors’ lounge seemed to care.
I remember seeking out a psychologist who had a fairly high tech research background, to see if he was anywhere nearly as excited as I was. To say “no” is a gross understatement.
He told me about an idea which long before that had been both funded and forgotten. The idea had been one of a prosthetic frontal lobe. Frontal lobe of the brain, among other things, tells people what is “appropriate” socially. The one example I will never forget is the physician who (inappropriately) peed in his pants on rounds, and ended up having a frontal lobe tumor. So the idea was that somebody who had a hunk of frontal lobe excised to get rid of the tumor, or presumably some other kind of illness, could have a teency-tiny computer to hold in their hand that would do some frontal lobe kinds of things that they no longer could.
The attempt to develop this happened on the east coast, presumably sometime after Noah’s flood, and the funding dried up just like that great flood did.
Of course, another possibility is that men do not much care where and when they pee. I doubt this, since I had a patient in Oklahoma who had purchased a fair amount of real estate in his life and thought it necessary and appropriate to “mark” it in the same way a dog marks his territory. Yes, it involved peeing in public, but the fellow had no known frontal lobe pathology at the time.
Ah, those Oklahoma men. Read more on Maybe Those People Who Annoy Can Get A Prosthetic Brain…
Filed under Research by on Oct 6th, 2011. Comment.