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Podcast 161: Boston bombings’ lessons part two

Joe Elia • May 14th, 2013

Categories: Boston Marathon, Emergency medicine, Mass casualties, Terrorism, Uncategorized

(4 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

Alasdair Conn, chief of emergency services at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School continues our series on the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings.

Thank you for listening. Do let us know what you think.

Joe Elia

Links:

Dr. Conn’s essay in the Annals of Internal Medicine

Last week’s conversation with Dr. Ron Walls

 

Podcast 160: The Marathon bombing — lessons learned

Joe Elia • May 9th, 2013

Categories: Boston Marathon, Emergency medicine, Mass casualties, Terrorism, Uncategorized

(6 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)

Thank you for your questions about the status of Clinical Conversations. We’re edging our way back toward a normal schedule with this, the first of a planned multipart series on the lessons learned in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings.

Ron M. Walls, professor and chair of the department of emergency medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School is the guest. Listen in and please let us know what you think.

Joe Elia

Link:

The JAMA “Viewpoint” piece written with Michael Zinner.

Podcast 159: Making the Clinical Diagnosis, But Blowing the Patient’s Treatment Preference

Joe Elia • November 10th, 2012

Categories: Audio, breast cancer, Diagnosis, Patient care, treatment choice, Uncategorized

(8 votes, average: 3.25 out of 5)

Running time: 20 min.

In some diseases there are two diagnoses to make: the clinical diagnosis and the diagnosis of what the patient’s treatment preference is. The first is hard enough to make, and the widening choice of treatment choices complicates the second.

Welcome to the task of “preference diagnosis,” which can lead to disappointment and worse if missed in diseases like breast or prostate cancer.

We talk this week with the authors of an essay on the topic in BMJ. They offer some advice and some resources you’ll find useful.

Links:

 

Podcast 158: Physician-assisted dying — a conversation with Dr. Marcia Angell about the Massachusetts ‘Death with Dignity’ ballot question

Joe Elia • October 18th, 2012

Categories: death, dying, Massachusetts, Patient care

(6 votes, average: 3.17 out of 5)

Our conversation explores the question that Dr. Marcia Angell poses in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books: May doctors help you to die?

Angell’s is the first name to appear as the sponsor of a November 6 ballot initiative here in Massachusetts, which is modeled on the Oregon law already in place.

I’d expect there to be some disagreement with her arguments, and you’re welcome to leave some feedback at 617-440-4374. I’d like to include them as part of the next podcast.

Here are some links:

1. Angell’s essay in the New York Review of Books

2. Information on the ballot initiative from Ballotpedia

3. The full text of the “Massachusetts Death with Dignity Act”

Podcast 157: Of parking lots, low back pain, the Yankees, writing, and — oh yes — clinical medicine

Joe Elia • June 26th, 2012

Categories: Audio, exercise, soccer, Uncategorized, urban planning

(5 votes, average: 4.60 out of 5)

A chat with clinician-essayist Cameron Page, whose essay “They Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot” appears in this month’s Health Affairs.

Our conversation explores the connections in medicine that link outside the clinic walls, with stops along the way at William Carlos Williams, Richard Seltzer, the Yankees, and more.

We get around to low back pain, eventually. Join us for a summer kick-off conversation

Health Affairs essay (free)

Podcast 156: Using low-dose CT screening for lung cancer in defined populations — a conversation with Peter Bach

Joe Elia • May 20th, 2012

Categories: Audio, CT screening, lung cancer, screening, Uncategorized

(8 votes, average: 2.13 out of 5)

Dr. Peter Bach is the first author on a new JAMA analysis of the benefits and harms of using low-dose CT screening  for lung cancer. The American College of Chest Physicians and the American Society of Clinical Oncology requested the systematic review to assist them in drawing up a clinical guideline.

Join us in discussing who might most benefit from being offered such screening, and what work remains to be done.

Links:

JAMA article (free)

Physician’s First Watch coverage of recent guidelines from the American Lung Assoc. (free)