“In the end, the patient-physician relationship is crucial to overall decision-making for any plan of care, treatment, or surgery. There are many variations in the reviewed studies in health care literature as to the cost-effectiveness of second …
Category: Oncology/Hematology
Patients need palliative care to manage the pain of sickle cell disease
Sickle cell disease (SCD) affects about 100,000 Americans as an inherited genetic disorder with intermittent exacerbations requiring hospitalization. SCD is also a painful and complicated disease with no single physician specialist that can provide pai…
When doctors can’t hug
I stood outside the busy ICU room with Gregory’s mom, holding her hand and talking softly, while the team inside removed his breathing tube and prepared him for his final trip home. Gregory was dying from a devastating brain tumor with no known c…
How MRI-guided radiation therapy is changing the paradigm in pancreatic cancer [PODCAST]
“The data are remarkable and promising, though beyond the numbers is a bigger picture. Each data point represents a life – a mother, uncle, grandparent, loved one, friend. Technological advances in image guidance and therapeutic delivery are allo…
The price of love is loss. But still we pay.
I just wanted to tell you that I had a wonderful patient as a consult today. She had a pretty bad prognosis and was a recently diagnosed hepatobiliary cancer patient. Pretty aggressive disease with wild metastasis. From her time of diagnosis to my cons…
Tumor-informed residual disease testing can help inform cancer treatment
Life can feel full of uncertainty when battling cancer, with few guarantees. “Is there still cancer in my body?” and “Will it come back?” are common questions that have long been difficult to answer confidently until recently. A…
With Lynch Syndrome, knowledge alone isn’t power [PODCAST]
“I imagine I would have, as I’m sure so many others do, headed to the Internet, reading both accurate and inaccurate information. While much of my visit with my genetic counselor feels like a blur, I left that meeting with a list of answered ques…
How to convert medical knowledge into digital assets that work for you
Over 12 months, I rebuilt my practice workflow to solve the problem of inefficient knowledge transfer between me and my patients. Now with a new system incorporating a library of leveraged digital assets I’m saving time and improving patient expe…
Keeping a cancer diagnosis silent
It is a seasonally cold fall evening in Long Island, NY, and I am standing in a field in the middle of what should be a darkened park. Still, I am truly amazed by how bright it is lit up by lanterns with different colors demarcating patients, families,…
A physician and sister, but also an accomplice?
My older sister, Joy, will soon die from metastatic breast cancer. She will pass away at age 50. She will leave behind a husband of 21 years and the three children they nurtured to young adulthood. Our elderly parents will lament the unnatural timin…
