Category: Mainstream media

Prostate cancer screening campaigns are giving men the finger

Fifty years ago, in a golden moment of television comedy shows, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In program regularly featured “The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate” award.  Wikipedia says it “recognized actual dubious achievements by public individuals or institutions.” Do a Google search.  You’ll quickly see how popular this award became. Yes, I’m dating myself by going […]

Why academic medicine needs to value physician contributions to online platforms

In academic medicine, promotion depends on the weight of our curricula vitae, measured primarily by the number of papers we publish in peer-reviewed journals. Physicians strive to jump through the hoops of publishing their work in “top” journals ranked by the “impact factor” (yearly average number of citations for a given journal). Yet the “impact […]

The problem with first-person reporting of unproven interventions

Houston Chronicle reporter Craig Hlavaty recently treated readers to a first-person account of getting an intravenous (IV) vitamin infusion inside a van parked outside his house. The article, “Feeling the drip, drip, drip of the mobile IV craze,” related how a needle was inserted into his arm, “just where a tattooed lightning bolt strikes.” Hlavaty extolled the […]

How every female physician can be a somebody

We live in incredible times. A time when a millennial with a YouTube account clears six-figures a year (sometimes, seven figures!) with just a computer and a webcam. A time when a small-town girl with a love of fashion and an Instagram account can go from Nowheresville, America to front row at New York Fashion […]