Cell 2 Soul: The Humane Health Care Blog

Heart Matters: Katherine Treadway, M.D.

Katherine Treadway teaches medical students about the patient-doctor relationship at Harvard.  She will give a free talk in Lenox, MA next week.

Heart Matters:
The Patient-Doctor Relationship
Thursday, October 11, 2012 at 6:00 p.m.
Shalespeare and Company
Founder's Theater
70 Kemble Street, Lenox, MA
Sponsored by BMC

Treadway has written extensively on this topic. "I watch the second-year students file into the Ether Dome for their first day of my “Patient–Doctor 2” course. For me, this course marks their true entry into medical school. Here, they will refine their history-taking skills, building on their knowledge of pathophysiology and disease; they will learn how to perform a physical examination; and they will touch a living stranger's body as clinicians for the first time. For them, right now, these are just skills to be learned. They do not see how they will be transformed by them. They know that these newfound abilities will open the door to clinical medicine. They do not know how utterly changed they will be by crossing that threshold."  Full Article

If you wish to attend, please email Sue Kelly at BMC or call 413-447-2775 by October 9 

Dr. Treaway’s advice to students:
As you acquire more medical knowledge and responsibility, there will be times you will focus more and more on the problem and forget the patient attached to it. As you strive to take a good history, get the facts straight, perform a good physical exam, and put it all together into a comprehensive clinical picture, you will find that with all the anxiety involved in wanting to do it right, the patient becomes further and further away...
While I am busy treating the bodies of my patients, I try to remember to treat the patients as well — to touch them in small ways as well as large.

Dr. Greer and Homeless Health Care

Please try to attend this

important and inspirational

presentation

 

Free and Open to the Public

or more information, contact Dave Elpern 

Three Wounded Healers

Dr. Bill Zeckhausen has prepared a talk on three individuals who have been a source of constant inspiration to him in his personal and professional life. Bill writes:

"All of us have been, are, and will be wounded, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I believe at some level we all know that. I wish to introduce, or reintroduce for you three wounded healers, who by sharing honestly the process they’ve gone through, are a gift to us."

These sources of light are:
Jane Babin a poet and a lawyer with ALS
Rachel Naomi Remen: physician, writer, guru
Dan Gottleib a psychologist, philosopher and quadriplegic

Here is the talk: Download Montreal.pdf

Taylor Mali Gig

There's a saying:  The Mountain Comes to Mohammed. 

Great performers come to this sleepy valley with regularity.  On Thursday evening, October 16, the renown Slam Artist, Taylor Mali, will perform for Mt. Greylock high school and the public.  Mali is extraordinary.  If you are free that evening try to attend.

An Evening with Taylor Mali
7:30 pm
Thursday, October 16
Mt. Greylock Regional Highschool
Williamstown, Massachusetts

Excerpt from "Silver-Lined Heart"

By Taylor Mali (www.taylormali.com)

"I’m for reckless abandon
and spontaneous celebrations of nothing at all,
like the twin flutes I kept in the trunk of my car
in a box labeled Emergency Champagne Glasses!

Raise an unexpected glass to long, cold winters
and sweet hot summers and the beautiful confusion of the times in between.
To the unexpected drenching rain that leaves you soaking
wet and smiling breathless;
“We danced in the garden in torn sheets in the rain,”
we were christened in the sanctity of the sprinkler,
can’t you hear it singing out its Hallelujah?"

Here is more information on Poetry Slam.

Nepal On My Mind

Dr. Ravi Shankar, a medical educator in Nepal, submitted this moving photograph and a poem: In the Valley of Gods  Download Shankar.pdf to Cell 2 Soul.  Williams College student Shirish Poudyal kindly added the Nepali text to the photograph. You can contact Dr. Shankar at Email to let him know you enjoyed his photo and poem.

For those who live in or near Williamstown, there will be a lecture and film on Friday, October 10 on climbing Everest and fighting blindness in Nepal by Dr. Geoffrey Tabin, an ophthalmologist at the University of Utah. The talk and film:  Impossible Dreams – "The first ascent of the East Face of Mt. Everest and eliminating preventable and treatable blindness." will be at  7:30 p.m., Paresky Auditorium.  Dr. Tabin is co-director of the Himalayan Blindness Project. 

If you need directions to Paresky Auditorium you can call Williams Information 413-597-3131.

A Genie, the Bottle and Nirvana

"Jill Bolte Taylor (JBT) was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana.

She did it by having a stroke.

On Dec. 10, 1996, Dr. Taylor, then 37, woke up in her apartment near Boston with a piercing pain behind her eye. A blood vessel in her brain had popped. Within minutes, her left lobe — the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context — began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great."

The New York Times Journal of Medicine had a fine piece about JBT on Sunday, May 25, 2008.  You can access this article here:  JBT NYT

In addition, TED has a presentation by JBT on their web site.  It is 18 minutes long, but it is fascinating and worth listening to:  My Stroke of Insight

What are your thoughts about this?  This is controversial.  It touches on the connection between Cells to Soul which is a concern of ours.

Overtreated in America

Shannon Brownlee, a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, gave two important talks at Williams College on October 10, 2007.  Her visit was sponsored by the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences.  Brownlee's stories, essays, and opinion pieces about medicine and health care have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, Time, Discover, BusinessWeek, Washington Monthly, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wilson Quarterly.

The October 10th presentations focused on her important new book: "Overtreated:  How too much medicine is making us sicker and poorer."  Her talks addressed the overuse and misuse of drugs and medical technologies.  It is a more rounded and factual presentation of Michael Moore's health-care shockumentary "Sicko" -- with a proposed solution! 
Here is a pdf of her talk: Download brownlee_williams.edt.pdf

In "Laws," Plato discusses the difference between free and slave doctors.  This is germane to Ms. Brownlee's description of an ideal physician. Download plato_physician.pdf

The Last Lecture

"What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? For Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, the question isn't rhetorical -- he's dying of cancer." (from WSJ article)

Ben Barankin sent us the link to an inspiring article about a Carnegie Mellon Proffesors:  "Last Lecture."

The article will be available on the Wall Street Journal's web site for another five days (but those with access to a college or university library may be able to access it longer).

This is a "must read, must see" for all of us -- so please take the time.

Dr. Pausch', a Carnegie Mellon University computer-science professor, had been invited to give his "last Lecture; but the speech was more than just an academic exercise. The 46-year-old father of three has pancreatic cancer and expects to live for just a few months. His lecture, using images on a giant screen, turned out to be a rollicking and riveting journey through the lessons of his life.

In this Electonic Age the WSJ is not the only show in town.  Professor Pausch's oration can be viewed on YouTube  It is well worth the time.

The concept of one's last lecture is a valid one.  We can think of what this would mean for us to deliver and whose "Last Lecture" we'd particularly like  to hear.

Jared Diamond

Collapse

Williams College

January 10, 2007

Jared Diamond spoke at Chapin Hall last night to a packed house.  He gives great podium!  The talk is one he gives often; however, it was well-received and stimulating.  The following is taken from the web site of "The Edge"

WHY DO SOME SOCIETIES MAKE DISASTROUS DECISIONS?:

"What I'm going to suggest is a road map of factors in failures of group decision making. I'll divide the answers into a sequence of four somewhat fuzzily delineated categories. First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Secondly, when the problem arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem. Then, after they perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the problem. Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts to do so. While all this talking about reasons for failure and collapses of society may seem pessimistic, the flip side is optimistic: namely, successful decision-making. Perhaps if we understand the reasons why groups make bad decisions, we can use that knowledge as a check list to help groups make good decisions."

I'll try to get my notes on here in a few days.


DJE