Blog and Articles

7Jan, 2015

Is Medical Technology Creating Cumaean Sibyls?

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In T.S. Eliot’s epic poem “the Wasteland” which is rife with recollections of youth & anticipatory images of death, the narrator begins with a quote from Petronius’s fictional work Satyricon. The character Trimalchio comes upon the mythic Cumaean Sibyl who had asked a God to live forever, but forgot to ask for perpetual youth. She achieved immortality but at the price of the deterioration of her body into dust with only her voice still intact. When Trimalchio asks the Sybil, who is in a jar hanging from a tree limb, […]
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11Mar, 2015

The Lance Armstrong Conundrum

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Say what you will about Mr. Armstrong’s use of performance enhancing substances, he will be best remembered by this oncologist as, if not the founder of the patient survivorship movement, the charismatic financer of it. With impressive altruism, he revealed to the world private aspects of his health history in order that other cancer survivors should not feel stigmatized and in fact be proud of having weathered what is often a harrowing storm of anti-cancer therapy. His foundation has funded research in survivorship, so much so that much of the […]
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28Nov, 2016

The Kids Are Alright

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“Millennials” are defined by Time Magazine as those individuals born between 1980-2000 and this group has been the focus of cultural distain on a number of dimensions. However, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) website has population data visualizations both in reports and outside of reports which seem the cause for some celebration of the teen millennials.  The graphs below are from the CDC website, http://www.cdc.gov/ accessed 07/04/2016 and document meaningful decrements in teen alcohol and marijuana use, tobacco smoking, use of non-medical psychotherapeutics and births to teenage mothers. Clearly there are a […]
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