What I Read Last Week

Last week was different from a usual work week for me and my reading reflected that. I was privileged to be invited to The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus as the Meiklejohn Visiting Professor. I got to spend a couple of days there, gave two talks, and met with slew of wonderful members of the faculty. Like the best of these visits (at least from my point of view) I felt like I learned more than I taught. The comments and questions after my first talk had me pulling out my laptop at the first chance to revise the slides.

As a guest of the Division of General Internal Medicine, I got spend quite a bit of time with Mark Earnest, the head of the division. Although I had heard of Mark, we had never met and I am embarrassed to admit that I did not know his writing. On the flight back to Midway, I dove into a series of Perspective pieces that he has published in the New England Journal of Medicine: Something for Sleep; The Thin Pane; When Cancer Cured Pain; Engineering for Grief; and On Becoming a Plague Doctor.

Although I have published my share of health humanities pieces, and filled Sensible Medicine with my Friday Reflections, I’m actually not a big fan of doctor reflections. There are exceptions of course – Abraham Verghese, Henry Marsh, Charles Bardes – but I find too many of them to be self-important navel gazing. I worry about this every time I write one.

Dr. Earnest’s pieces are something special. Although they are clearly written by a dedicated physician, their strength and beauty is not in their description of disease or the diagnostic process but in their perceptive and empathic description of people (definitively people rather than patients) for whom he has cared. I think that Something for Sleep and The Thin Pane are my favorites but you’d be missing out to not read them all. I plan to set up a google alert so I don’t miss future pieces.

Given a round trip between Chicago and Denver, I also had a bunch of time to read. I am totally a fiction guy and one of my go to genres are books that take place in the New York City of my childhood, the ‘70s and ‘80s.¹ I am currently reading Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem. It’s more aughts than my childhood years but I’m still loving it. Lethem’s ability to create unique and interesting characters is up there with the best of them.

I’ve been working on a piece for Sensible Medicine titled “Conventional Medicine Invites the Rise of Alternative Medicine.” It is scheduled for this Friday. Writing it, I’ve been thinking a lot about the differential experiences that conventional and alternative medicine offer. Out of nowhere, in Chapter 5 of Chronic City, came a visit to an alternative healer. Lethem so perfectly describes the experience and what makes it therapeutic.

Later, the character who visits Strabo, the healer, describes what was beneficial.

The needles imparted a gravitas to Strabo that his customers, who otherwise paid handsomely to lie on a table and be reminded to breathe, must find reassuring.

…Strabo employed techniques perfected by British mediums during the great Victorian craze for psychic phenomena of all types: safely evocative of flattering generalizations with which anyone would agree, combined with precise secret research into the subject’s background in order to provide a clinching detail or two.

It’s fiction, and describes one encounter, but it nicely describes our desire to feel better and how a skilled practitioner can harness it (and profit from it).

Baseball Factoid. In 1997, Greg Maddux threw a 78-pitch (63 strikes, 15 balls) complete game.

1. & Sons and The Blizzard Party are two of my recent favorites.

Photo by Aaron Burden