Friday, November 12, 2010

No Words

I'm just plain out of words.

When I was working as a journalist and I couldn't find exactly the words I wanted for a story, I'd just put in a dummy "lede" and keep writing. Eventually, I'd find the lede, and put it in the proper place but meanwhile, I'd have the bulk of the story written. 

But there's a huge difference between blogging in this kind of blog and writing a news or feature story intended for newspapers. With only a couple exceptions in a 15-year career, I never wrote about me. And I worked hard to keep my opinions out of the stories. 

But this blog? Pretty much all about me and my family, mostly about me and my chronic illness. And while I could probably whine every day about which part(s) hurt worse that day, I prefer to limit my whining to the days I really need it. :-)

What else is there to blog about? I've read some interesting articles lately:

NYT writer Dr. Pauline Chen (an MD type of doctor, fwiw) wrote about the need for doctors (and researchers, drug companies, etc) to listen to patients who have to live with the ongoing side effects of the "life saving" treatments they undergo.

NPR did a fascinating story on research results that show that doctors who are paid to give talks about drugs subconsciously start prescribing the drugs more frequently. Not shocking -- there's a reason why the drug companies hire docs for those kinds of talks -- and yet disappointing.

An AP article described that a detailed family medical history was a better predictor on whether people people were at high risk for various diseases than genetic testing.

A blog post at KevinMD aimed at other medical professionals reminding them what a blessing hospice can be, and that every patient deserves a pain-free death with dignity.

And an MSNBC.com story about a courageous surgeon who wrote a medical journal article about a mistake he made in surgery, and details the personal and system-wide errors that were made. Mistakes are made every day in hospitals around the country and around the world. The best way to combat them is to talk about them so everyone can learn how to avoid them in the future  

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