At Albany Medical College, the master of physical examination was Dr. Beebe. The son and grandson of country doctors, Richard Beebe was an internist who made house calls. He earned his degree in the 1920’s at Johns Hopkins in the wake of giants like Osler, Cushing, and Halsted, and for six decades he roamed the hallways of my alma mater with a doctor’s bag in hand. I once saw a history and physical he had written. Penned in a small, looping cursive that slanted elegantly, the document was four full pages, a masterpiece.
I dropped my wife’s new iPad. Dropping things is one of the many curses of oafdom, a defining condition for me. And this promised to be costly: The impact cracked the corner of the glass surface leaving the screen portion unaffected, but marring the machine’s techno-loveliness, and sending my better half into a funk.
It’s been quite a year for health care and evidence. I’ll be joining Minnesota NPR on December 30th to discuss some of the top stories of the year, so I thought an editorial comment on a few of these stories might be in order. We’ll add others from time to time.
The biggest ever… and way too small
In the last few months there have been tectonic shifts in the world of cancer screening. Peer-reviewed journals, lay press outlets, and prominent medical groups have all published new material with far-reaching implications. This post is about mammography and the import of these recent events, including an unfortunate review in the New England Journal of Medicine. In the coming weeks I will post about PSA testing.