At the urging of my colleague Abel, who liveblogged his own vasectomy, I’m documenting my first mammogram. Given that I had pretty much no idea what to expect going into this, I’m hopeful that this post will demystify the experience a little for those who know they probably should get mammograms but have been putting it off.
Let me preface this by saying that there was no special reason that my primary care physician ordered a mammogram for me aside from my being 40. As such, there’s no special cause to be worried for my health as I wait for the results.
Category Archives: Medicine
Book review: And the Band Played On.
Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
There are a few books on my shelf that I can read any given number of times without being bored or impatient. One of these is And the Band Played On, a painstaking work of journalism that never feels laborious in the reading — despite being in excess of 600 pages.
Randy Shilts, who was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle reporting on AIDS in the early 1980s, assembled an intricate chronological telling of the early unfolding of the AIDS epidemic, from the first glimmerings of awareness of a new disease among doctors, public health workers, and trackers of epidemics, to the reactions of people in communities hit by this new disease (especially the gay communities in New York City and San Francisco), to the responses of politicians and policy makers who, almost without exception, dropped the ball.
Talking with kids about drugs.
Abel Pharmboy and Drugmonkey are having a conversation that I wish I could approach completely abstractly, about what parents ought to be telling their kids about drugs (whether legal or illegal) and their use. (Also, Page 3.14 has a reader’s poll about whether teens can be scared off illegal drugs. Poll results will be published in the ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap newsletter, for which you can sign up here.)
Of course, having two kids who are not yet teens but don’t seem to be getting any younger, the issue doesn’t feel abstract at all. The clock is ticking.
Here’s what is currently shaping my strategy:
Should researchers share data?
A colleague of mine (who has time to read actual printed-on-paper newspapers in the morning) pointed me toward an essay by Andrew Vickers in the New York Times (22 January 2008) wondering why cancer researchers are so unwilling to share their data. Here’s Vickers’ point of entry to the issue:
A tangle of controversy — and a plea to start untangling.
You’ve probably heard that UCLA scientist Edythe London, whose house was earlier vandalized to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars by animal rights activists, has once again been targeted. This time an incendiary device was left on her front door.
Abel and Mark weighed in on this appalling use of tactics to terrorize a scientist doing work on approved protocols — protocols that had to meet the stringent standards imposed by federal regulations. But while the NIH and the odd newspaper columnist stands up to make the case for animal use in medical research and against the violent intimidation of medical researchers, there seems not to be much in the way of public outcry.
Do people really feel like firebombing is a legitimate means of persuasion?
My guess is that they don’t. However, some of the details of the situation as described in a recent article in the Los Angeles Times may explain why the public is conflicted. Beyond animal use, the area of London’s research and the source of her funding seem to be raising discomfort, creating a tangled knot of controversy that’s begging to be untangled.
What’s a disease?
“What is a disease?”
It would be nice to think that this is the kind of question where there are clear-cut, fact-based answers to be had. “Disease” is a term that seems to pick out a category of biological conditions, and biologists are pretty good with categorization.
Super Bowl parties, double dipping, and strategies for emerging alive.
Via Greg Laden, I see that there is now some research to support our primal revulsion toward double-dippers:
Tracking down a source.
Maybe you saw the story in the New York Times about new research that may show that ingesting too much caffeine while pregnant increases the chances of miscarriage. And, if you’re like me, one of the first things you did was try to track down the actual research paper discussed in the newspaper article.
If so, I hope you’ve had better luck than I have.
Ethical considerations in the development of a male birth control pill.
“Why don’t they make a birth control pill for men?”
There are important considerations from medical ethics that might explain why a birth control pill for men has not happened yet.
There are days when having a body is inconvenient.
Do you know that feeling one gets that is characteristic of “about to come down with something”, where you have an off taste in your mouth and your head feels fuzzy, and it seems like the very best thing you could possibly do is just lay your head on your desk for a few moments and close your eyes?
Yeah. I’ve had that feeling all day.
However, I have absolutely zero time to actually come down with something at this particular juncture. Therefore, I will be conducting a Mind Over Immune System experiment (not a very scientific one, I’ll admit) in which I see whether telling myself sternly not to get sick keeps me from actually getting sick.
Indeed, I feel extra-motivated not to succumb to whatever bug is trying to get the upper hand given that I learned from a reliable source this morning that it is possible to vomit through one’s nose (indeed, to be woken up by doing so in one’s sleep). That in itself sounds like a good reason never to get sick. Ever!