Please come

In what is clearly a massive oversight, ScienceBlogs has invited me to do whatever it is I do under their formidable umbrella at a new site: http://scienceblogs.com/signout. Don’t worry–although I’ll have some impressive new neighbors, it’ll still just be me, with the same ratty furniture and the same funny smell.
This site will no longer be updated regularly, [...]

Tell us

Next week’s Grand Rounds will be hosted at the new Signout on Tuesday, January 23.
Every medical student takes courses in physiology, pathophysiology, histology, and pharmacology. A new science has recently been added to this basic battery: evidence-based medicine, the science of critically searching and reading the scientific literature. Finding proof for our daily practice as doctors has [...]

The new black

I just finished a rotation in pediatric hematology and oncology, where almost all of the kids I was taking care of had cancer. Most had leukemia or lymphoma with prognoses that were varying degrees of good. A few had other, highly curable solid tumors. Only one kid–a boy I’ve written about here twice before–had a bad cancer. But boy, [...]

Voice

There’s a 3-year old kid on our pediatric hematology-oncology service who has a high-risk, stage IV, disseminated neuroblastoma: a bad cancer with a terrible prognosis. The mass in his liver is huge, and distends his abdomen way out of proportion to his limbs. He is otherwise a truly beautiful child, with big, blue eyes and an open, winning [...]

Behavior that persists

For several weeks in December, I worked with an adolescent medicine doctor who was like magic. Watching him massage our spectacularly manipulative patients into compliance was like watching someone fit a greased elephant into a cigar box. His motto was, as he told me repeatedly, “Every behavior that persists is being rewarded on some level.”
We had a patient for a time, an [...]