Blogcritics has picked another article, this one a book review, as a Pick of the Week for April 19 - 25. I love getting some recognition.
The piece mentioned was a book review on another of Donna Leon’s series of mysteries set in Venice, Italy. This one was Alta Acqua.
An April 17 article in the Boston Globe notes that Ferlinghetti has reached 87 and, still the symbol of the Beats, is still around. The article goes on to discuss the importance of Robert Frank’s seminal, wonderful book, The Americans which was the visual equivalent of the Beat movement, Kerouac and Sandburg and the Beat poets rolled up into picture frames.
Tonight at 7, the New England Poetry Club presents its Golden Rose Award to Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Harvard’s Yenching Auditorium. Ferlinghetti, bless him, turned 87 last month: proprietor of City Lights Books, in San Francisco; author of ”A Coney Island of the Mind”; and grand old man of that least button-down of literary movements, the Beats.
Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs long ago barreled their way into the canon. They were as much a state of mind as anything else: advance scouts of the ’60s, all T-shirts, beards, and Benzedrine, at a time when ties were tied, jaws were shaven, and drugs came out of medicine cabinets…
It’s through Frank’s book that the Beats profoundly affected how we see. Frank took the leading tradition of American photography — the documentary tradition, with its reverence for the particular, the tradition of Mathew Brady, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans — and doubly enlarged it. He emblematized the particular, making it mythic; and he vastly expanded the accepted view of what constituted vernacular photography.
It is “The Talk”. It is the difficult act of telling someone that they
or a family member or spouse is catastrophically ill or dying. It is
always hard on the patient or family member. It has come to light that
it is hard for the doctor because he or she is untrained to handle the
scenario nor its unpredictable results.
The movies have more than a few of those heavy scenes when the doctor
gives the ultimate bad news — you are dying, the loved one is dying,
there is no hope. Television soap operas brought these scenes to the
summit of melodrama. Very slowly the medical profession is beginning to
address the training of physicians to better do the difficult job of explaining
illness, pain or death.
Woody Allen made it a joke. His characters imagine the scene in their
hypochondria or tell stories about “the talk” or an imagined discussion
of mortality. The heavy talks are not comedy but some sense of humor or,
at least, sense of the others’ feelings would be helpful.
There were the scenes after my heart attack 12 years ago. The
first was the day after the heart attack. The cardiologist (who had saved
my life) I soon learned was totally without a bedside manner. He visited
my hospital bed where I was still saying, “You can’t mean I
had a heart attack!. He said, “Absolutely. But don’t worry.
If all else fails you are a great candidate for a transplant.”
“A” in cardiology, “F” in sensitivity.
Five years ago when the by-passed arteries totally closed again and I
was in great pain, sucking on an oxygen tank, my cardiologist (in Mexico) told me
it was time to go back to the US. He hugged me and said that he
“hoped to see me again”. More senitive; more frightening.
There were the early days after the heart attack when I would go to the
doctor for regular EKGs and blood tests and ask if the EKG showed
improvement. They would look uncomfortable and explain they never showed
improvement. Their discomfort was discomforting.
Just recently the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in
“Bad News” that medical schools are now, finally, addressing the
issue of how physicians learn “how to handle the ‘talk’”. Only a decade
ago the schools gave no training in the kind of situation that should be
discussed and taught since it is one, “… repeated thousands of times
a day at bedsides, across desktops and over the phone, turning lives
upside down… Now a majority of the medical schools at least address
the issue, says a spokeswoman from the Association of American Medical
Schools.”
A 2005 study of third-year medical students showed that in a majority of
cases where their patients died during their internal medicine
rotation, the medical team never brought up death. When they did it was
treated only in terms of medical technicalities. The attending
physicians only mentioned emotional issues in 6 of 27 cases.
One physician thinking and writing on the subject created the seminal
book on the subject, How To Break Bad News: A Guide For Health Care
Professionals. In this book Robert Buckman, a Toronto oncologist
outlines 6 steps in giving out bad news. He starts with setting the
scene in a quiet place. Seems pretty obvious to me but physicians are
so focused away from emotions and feelings that the whole thing was
ignored until recently. “Hey, pal. You’re dying,” might have been
acceptable for specialists before doctors were expected to be sensitive.
Only those Norman Rockwell doctors with the neat, black leather bags,
Drs. Welby and Kildare, could do it better.
Dennis Novak, Dean at the Drexel (Philadelphia) School of Medicine
related how he had taught himself the practice of giving bad news.
“There was one patient who asked me, ‘Am I dying?,’ and I just said,
‘Yes.’ I would never say that now.” Novak and colleagues at Drexel
recently received $200,000 to create “Doc.com” which is making 40 videos
which can be downloaded and used at medical schools where scenarios are
made using experts and patient-actors to start discussions of relating
to patients and families during these crises.
But doctors say that no matter how seasoned, some reactions
can’t be anticipated.“My colleague told a family that their mother was very sick, and the son
had a heart attack in her office,” says David Muller, dean of Mount
Sinai Medical School in New York.
Like many areas where sensitivity is needed in the medical professions,
it’s about time for a start.
Blogcritics just named the previous article, “Will Blogging Make You Blind” a Pick Of The Week.
I am pleased. I do often think that no one is reading my attempts to string words together. Therefore it was a cheering discovery tonight.
High Fiber Diets Do Help Hearts - Reuters reported today
A fiber-rich diet may help control levels of a blood protein linked to an increased risk of heart disease, new research suggests.
In a study of 524 healthy adults, investigators found that those with the highest fiber intake had lower blood levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) than those who ate the least fiber. CRP is a marker of ongoing inflammation in the body, and consistently high levels of this protein have been identified in previous studies as a risk factor for future heart disease.
This study suggests that the guideline of 20-35 grams of fiber a day is beneficial.
This is from the
BBC and is worth a look. Smart people have brains that have grown differently. Or so they say.
Brain tissues wax and wane during childhood
Clever people outsmart their peers not because they have more grey matter but because part of their brain develops differently, a Nature study suggests.
The US National Institute of Mental Health used scans to study development of the cortex, which is responsible for thinking, in 307 children.
They found smarter youngsters tended to have a thin cortex aged seven, but this thickened rapidly by the age of 12.
Average children had an initially thick cortex which peaked in size aged eight.
In both cases, the cortex thinned after reaching this peak but this was more gradual in children of average IQ as their cortex had reached peak thickness at an earlier age.
The body’s development is intimately linked to interactions with its environment
Professor Richard Passingham
The researchers believe the extended period of thickening during the early years of the brighter children may give the brain more time to develop high-level thinking circuitry.