Worth reading: The Case for Waking

Poetry and medicine, from Janis Lou Harrington in JAMA: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2757230 The Case for Waking “I. Beside my husband’s ICU bed, I plead my case for waking, hold my palm flat as a bible, place his warm hand on mine. His face inscrutable beneath a bandage wreath, he breathes on his own, his heart pumps, his…

Worth reading: Opioid Prescribing in the Midst of Crisis – Myths and Realities

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1914257 Great perspective from Michael L. Barnett, M.D., in NEJM. Sadly, it’s paywalled, but I share a useful table from the article below. Barnett describes the current state of opioid prescribing as an over-correction, in which the terrible opioid overdose epidemic has led public health officials and providers to move too far in the opposite…

COVID-19: Did the Spanish Flu kill “an estimated 2 to 3 percent of those infected”?

Within the past few weeks, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world, commenters in news media have propagated a meme that’s now firmly embedded in the public consciousness. It’s best summed up in an article in Vox that’s typical of the trend, “Did the coronavirus get more deadly? The death rate, explained.”1 The Vox…

Worth watching: Should You Opt Out of Patient Care That Offends Your Morals?

Art Caplan on regulations recently issued by President Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that permit physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and other healthcare workers to refuse to provide services to their patients if they have religious or personal reasons for a conscientious objection. Caplan’s take on this worrisome development is welcome and worthwhile, as…

Hildegard von Bingen – Canticles Of Ecstasy

The medieval music ensemble Sequentia created what I think are the most enjoyable renditions of the music of Hildegard von Bingen. I’m currently listening to Canticles of Ecstasy, one of nine albums of von Bingen’s music recorded by Sequentia. I reviewed her book Scivias in a previous blog post. From Sequentia’s Hildegard von Bingen Project,…

Worth reading: A critical view on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans

Abstract “Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance refers to the transmission of epigenetic information through the germline. While it has been observed in plants, nematodes and fruit flies, its occurrence in mammals—and humans in particular—is the matter of controversial debate, mostly because the study of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is confounded by genetic, ecological and cultural inheritance. In this…

Modeling the Spread of Infectious Disease: The SIR and MSEIR compartment models

Until the twentieth century, infectious diseases were the proximate cause of almost all human illness and death. Improvements in sanitation, widespread vaccination, and the advent of antibiotics began to turn the tide against the once intractable causative agents of these pathologies; bacteria and viruses. Major achievements of vaccination against globally endemic viral infections include the…

“My only crime is my face,” Perspective from Mary Oyama Mittwer and Miné Okubo

While browsing through an online museum exhibit, I came across an excerpt from this compelling article written during the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. I managed to find a scan of the full article hosted by the UC Berkeley Library. The writer describes her family’s internment experience until their release in 1943,…

Hypoxia, anoxia, lactic acid fermentation, and naked mole rats…

Fermentation is the ancient and evolutionarily conserved metabolic process by which glycolytic pyruvate is reduced by the electron carrier NADH, thus regenerating NAD+ while producing any of a number organism-specific end products. For example in yeast, the fermentation end product is ethanol, while in mammals, the end product is lactate. In mammals, this process occurs…

A brief history of the fall of Rome

The dissolution of the Western Roman Empire is popularly perceived as a sudden and dramatic cataclysm, with the “fall of Rome” often precisely dated to 476 CE. In that year, so the story goes, the child Emperor of the West (later derisively referred to as Romulus Augustulus), was deposed by the barbarian warlord Odoacer who…