Dramatic Medicine

For a long time, I did not think this day would ever come. I thought I would surely be using my Blackberry 8700c for years to come. (That review, by the way, is the reason I bought the phone!) Then, as time passed, things began to deteriorate. It just didn't run as well as it used to. Then came the day on which I couldn't turn the phone on at all, and I discovered that now if I wanted to turn on the phone from an off state, I had to completely remove the battery and put it back in. Then the scroll wheel started skipping. I decided that it was time for a new phone, and since I knew that Apple has been releasing new hardware in June I decided to wait for what I was sure was going to be the new iPhone 3GS.

Dr. Michelle Reisner, medical director of the Palliative Care program at Jersey City Medical Center, isn't out to kill you -- but she does want to help you die with dignity and grace.

How is it possible for a song to terrify you?  There is something unnerving, ethereal and uncanny about Cream's masterpiece -- White Room -- that still chills me over 40 years after its creation.

A Christian Fundamentalist Terrorist murdered Dr. George Tiller in his Wichita Church yesterday.

If you are rich and pretty and famous you are tempting an early grave because a devotion to the surface, and not the core, leads to psychological dissension between the wanton self and the desirous of mind -- according to a new University of Rochester study.  Perhaps marrying an ugly girl is, after all, the secret to carrying on a longer life.

Do medical television shows owe us a correct diagnosis and treatment of the ill and infirm -- or does anything go as entertainment in the unwinding drama?

Are you a left-brain learner or a right-brain learner?  Does it matter any longer?  Should we be "whole lobe" learners -- or do lateralized brains, instead of mirrored ones, better serve us?

Last week, three of the top ten sellers on Amazon.com were surgical masks.  People were buying the masks in a feint effort to protect themselves from the onslaught of the Swine Flu pandemic. This week, we are brought into the realm of the ridiculously sublime in the fashionable, yet tasteless, animal face surgical mask:

Grieving is frowned upon in America.  We are expected to buck up, to smile, and continue on with our day even in our deepest despair.  Grief, in America, is marker for a visible weakness and those in active grieving are required to put on a happy face and sing a tuneful song to demonstrate their fortitude and their goodwill for their fellow kind or risk being indelibly labeled as a crybaby:  If you must cry -- do it in private behind a locked door and under the covers in the middle of the night and don't make any sound.

Racing from torture and death, the United States has served as an international safe haven for immigrants the world over.