![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Guidelines for Epidemics: Who Gets a Ventilator?
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, March 25, 2008
It may sound unthinkable — the idea of denying life support to some people in a public health disaster like an epidemic. But a new report says doctors, health care workers and the public need to start thinking about it.
( Read More )
Cases: When the Disease Eludes a Diagnosis
By BARRON H. LERNER, M.D., The New York Times, March 25, 2008
Lucy, one of my longtime patients, has a neurological ailment she believes I have been unable to adequately diagnose.
Although I hope to make further progress on her case, I have also told her that there may never be a definitive answer. Not surprisingly, she is feeling pretty frustrated with me.
Why do doctors and patients often approach the diagnosis of disease so differently?
( Read More )
SEA SHRINKS FOAM Cups and their messages back from the Arctic Ocean: left, from recent Russian dives; right, from an earlier dive, with a landlubber.
Far Below the Surface of the World’s Oceans, a Tough Place for Foam Cups
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, The New York Times, March 25, 2008
Last August, as a team at the North Pole prepared to plunge more than two miles to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, some of the dozens of specialists who staged the dive engaged in a time-honored ritual: drawing on foam cups, decorating more than 100 of them.
The cups were then gingerly sent into the deep. During the historic dive, led by Russian scientists, the pressure of the surrounding water crushed the cups to the size of thimbles, also squeezing their whimsies of writing and drawing.
Afterward, the tiny cups became instant mementoes of the polar dive, offering striking proof of the descent into an unfamiliar zone and silent testimony to the crushing power of plain old water.
“The real North Pole,” read one cup’s shrunken writing. “Explore the abyss,” another urged.
Deep explorers have made thousands of such keepsakes over the decades, and more recently, schools have joined the fun as a way to drive home some of the peculiarities of a planet where very deep water covers some 65 percent of the surface.
( Read More )
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, March 25, 2008
It may sound unthinkable — the idea of denying life support to some people in a public health disaster like an epidemic. But a new report says doctors, health care workers and the public need to start thinking about it.
( Read More )
Cases: When the Disease Eludes a Diagnosis
By BARRON H. LERNER, M.D., The New York Times, March 25, 2008
Lucy, one of my longtime patients, has a neurological ailment she believes I have been unable to adequately diagnose.
Although I hope to make further progress on her case, I have also told her that there may never be a definitive answer. Not surprisingly, she is feeling pretty frustrated with me.
Why do doctors and patients often approach the diagnosis of disease so differently?
( Read More )
SEA SHRINKS FOAM Cups and their messages back from the Arctic Ocean: left, from recent Russian dives; right, from an earlier dive, with a landlubber.
Far Below the Surface of the World’s Oceans, a Tough Place for Foam Cups
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, The New York Times, March 25, 2008
Last August, as a team at the North Pole prepared to plunge more than two miles to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, some of the dozens of specialists who staged the dive engaged in a time-honored ritual: drawing on foam cups, decorating more than 100 of them.
The cups were then gingerly sent into the deep. During the historic dive, led by Russian scientists, the pressure of the surrounding water crushed the cups to the size of thimbles, also squeezing their whimsies of writing and drawing.
Afterward, the tiny cups became instant mementoes of the polar dive, offering striking proof of the descent into an unfamiliar zone and silent testimony to the crushing power of plain old water.
“The real North Pole,” read one cup’s shrunken writing. “Explore the abyss,” another urged.
Deep explorers have made thousands of such keepsakes over the decades, and more recently, schools have joined the fun as a way to drive home some of the peculiarities of a planet where very deep water covers some 65 percent of the surface.
( Read More )
