Pitfalls in Medicine.--II

Personalized Medicine: Promises and Pitfalls

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) describes personalized medicine as “the right patient with the right drug at the right dose at the right time,” and it certainly is a timely and emerging medical practice. Personalized Medicine: Promises and Pitfalls, by Gloria Gronowicz, begins with a unique perspective: the author’s own personal anecdote about the very day she was diagnosed with stage...

Image Guided SBRT II: Challenges & Pitfalls Dosimetric Challenges & Pitfalls

Pitfalls in diagnostic hematopathology -- Part II.

The overlapping features of malignant lymphomas create a diagnostic "grey zone" , and lead to the invention of "grey zone lymphomas". There are several major grey zone lymphomas: 1) Lymphomas with overlapping features of Hodgkin lymphoma and large B-cell lymphoma; 2) Lymphomas with overlapping features of Burkitt lymphoma and diffuse large B-cell lymphoma; 3) Lymphomas with overlapping features...

Narrative-based medicine: potential, pitfalls, and practice.

Introduction Narratives have always been a vital part of medicine. Stories about patients, the experience of caring for them, and their recovery from illness have always been shared—among physicians as well as among patients and their relatives. With the evolution of “modern” medicine, narratives were increasingly neglected in favor of “facts and findings,” which were regarded as more scientifi...

When medicine reverses itself: avoiding practice pitfalls.

An article in American Family Physician summarizing the top 20 research studies of 2011 reported on a number of practical, patientoriented findings.1 One striking feature of this article is the inclusion of several studies that challenge traditional medical opinion. In the 1990s, for example, high-carbohydrate, low-fat diets were all the rage; now the Mediterranean diet is shown to have better ...