January 10, 2011
By Kate Johnson
The Patients’ Association of Canada is gearing up for its official launch next month and I’ll be watching with interest to see what kind of spin they put on their message. Without a doubt, a group that aims to add the patient voice to healthcare policy debate is filling a gaping void. The question is whether PAC’s voice will simply join the throng or whether it will trigger change.Read More »
July 8, 2010
By Kate Johnson
I always love to see a journalist speaking into a microphone rather than holding one – especially in the context of a scientific meeting. That’s why science journalist Steve Silberman fuelled my delight earlier this week with his address to the very cool-sounding “Raz Lab” workshop.
The Raz Lab, run by Dr. Amir (– you-guessed it) Raz, is part of the Institute for Community and Family Psychiatry and Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. I didn’t attend the workshop – which was intended for international researchers with expertise in the placebo effect – but Silberman’s address was open to the public and it’s been on my calendar for weeks.
Silberman made a splash last fall with an article about the placebo effect that he wrote for Wired. That alone would have been enough to get me out, despite the Montreal heatwave. But what really piqued my curiosity was that he had been chosen to speak to a caste of scientists, AND in addition to talking about his research on placebos he was also going to tell them about the importance of science writing.Read More »
Published in the June 2010 Journal of the American Medical Writers Association
By Kate Johnson
How Respiratory Disease is Informing Gastrointestinal Research
June 3, 2010
By Kate Johnson
For a gastroenterologist, Nicholas Talley takes an unusual interest in his patients’ respiratory symptoms. He also considers their dermatologic history a vital part of his work-up. As professor and chair of internal medicine at Jacksonville’s Mayo Clinic College of Medicine Dr. Talley is refreshingly willing to step outside of his field of specialty to gather clues and gain insight into the roots of gastrointestinal dysfunction.
In a recent issue of Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology, he and his colleagues shared their observations about the common co-occurrence of certain gut and lung disorders, suggesting complaints from both ends might share the same cause and perhaps, in the future, might also share one treatment.
In fact, now that spring has sprung, if you suspect that asthma and allergies may also be upsetting your stomach, Dr. Talley believes you may be right.Read More »
April 26, 2010
By Kate Johnson
I got to head out of town for the Association of Health Care Journalists’ (AHCJ) meeting last week in Chicago. It was great to connect with so many other people who do what I do – or a version of it.
And there was an interesting mix of news and navel-gazing – the latter being of particular interest to me.
Despite the buzz about the first two big name speakers – both of them fizzled on the podium. Oddly, I thought it was an excellent way to kick off the meeting because it underscored a fundamental issue facing health and medical journalism.Read More »
April 20, 2010
By Kate Johnson
If I was a kid with cancer I’d invite Dr. Noah Federman to be the opening performance at my next birthday party. Dr. Federman is a pediatric oncologist, and Director of the Pediatric Bone and Soft Tissue Sarcoma Program at Mattel Children’s Hospital, UCLA – and while he uses a great deal of very sophisticated vocabulary that would fly right over the heads of my guests, he seems like the type who could make the necessary adjustments to fit his audience.
If I was the mother of a kid with cancer, Dr. Federman would be more than welcome at my kid’s party. Hearing him speak about nanotechnology at the American Society of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology I could picture a room full of sick kids and their parents drawing hope from his journey into deeper frontiers in cancer medicine.
I’m neither a kid with cancer nor the mother of one. What’s more I was probably the only non-scientist attending Dr. Federman’s talk. Perhaps it was this view “from the outside” that enabled me to see his potential as a birthday party performer.Read More »
Guest blog by my daughter Melanie, age 13. Written for her public speaking assignment at school.
I’d like to tell you a story about a little girl who had her heart broken when she was only two years old. This is a story about me, and don’t worry, it has a happy ending.
Ever since I knew how to walk, I had a tradition with my dad. We would walk up our street to the neighborhood patisserie, and sit in the sun to eat croissants. It was my absolute favorite thing to do. I even had a nickname for the owner of the patisserie, I called her the “con-con lady”, because I didn’t know how to say croissant.
One day , my mum told me that, from now on, I couldn’t go to the patisserie anymore. I cried, and cried, and my mum even started crying with me.
About 6 months before this happened, I was getting very sick. I was throwing up a lot, and was crying much more than usual. And I was tired all the time. In fact, some of the first words I ever spoke were “sick”, “tired”, and “bed”.Read More »
February 25, 2010
By Kate Johnson
In the loud noise that echoed worldwide after the Lancet’s stunning retraction of Andrew Wakefield’s controversial paper on the autism/MMR vaccine link, there was an equally stunning whisper from the journal’s editor Dr. Richard Horton, that is still bouncing around disagreeably in my head.
In a nutshell, it was a cloaked threat to the public’s right to know.
“The lesson we’ve learned is that anything we publish will be picked up and used. It certainly made us much more risk-averse, much more conservative,” he told National Public Radio.
“We now try to be even more cautious about the kinds of work we publish, recognizing that you cannot have a closed discussion in the scientific community about anything today. Everything is accessible to everybody, at any time.”
Yes, he acknowledged the journal’s mistake in publishing the fraudulent paper. In fact, he called it a “system failure”. “We failed, I think the media failed, I think government failed, I think the scientific community failed,” he said.
But then he dropped the “too much information” bomb.Read More »
January 22, 2010
By Kate Johnson
The earthquake in Haiti has delivered a different sort of seismic upheaval in the fields of both medicine and journalism, as professionals in both camps debate the ethics in the niche zone where their respective crafts overlap. Television MDs like Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Dr. Richard Besser have helped deliver babies and stitch up injuries with the cameras rolling, creating rumblings and debates about the blurring of journalistic and medical boundaries.
With journalistic clarity, The Society of Professional Journalists issued an unambiguous scolding: “Advocacy, self promotion, offering favors for news and interviews, injecting oneself into the story or creating news events for coverage is not objective reporting, and it ultimately calls into question the ability of a journalist to be independent, which can damage credibility,” SPJ President Kevin Smith said in a statement.
Characteristically, the American Medical Association was less specific and more cautious in urging restraint: “The spontaneous volunteer has no place in disaster response,” asserted James J. James, MD, DrPH, MHA, director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness and Disaster Response, at an American Medical Association (AMA) webinar.
But still, the television networks -– including ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN –- are milking the coverage of their physician reporters for all it’s worth.
January 8, 2010
By Kate Johnson
It’s cold and snowy in Montreal and the other day, as I was skiing down a crusty slope, icy crystals stinging my eyeballs, I closed my eyes. I couldn’t help it. When sharp objects fly into your cornea, your lashes instinctively close – even if you are hurtling down an icy hill at top speed. I could have had a catastrophic crash (such things do happen in the blink of an eye), but I followed my blind instinct, and everything was fine. And even before my eyes had re-opened I realized, that this is what I – and many other journalists are doing right now, everyday, in our careers.
Winter has descended on the age-old profession of journalism, changing the landscape so drastically that all the landmarks are gone. Little remains of the theories and ground rules I studied for my journalism degree. “The business” as I knew it when I started out 23 years ago has transformed beyond anyone’s wildest predictions, “undergoing a level of change that presents both unprecedented peril and possibility”, according to health journalism expert Gary Schwitzer.
Kate Johnson's Medical Musings 