Inside Dartmouth Medicine Dartmouth Medicine Magazine

A Mere Mortal

Dr. Steven Schlozman wasn't terribly surprised when an insurance company rejected his request to prescribe a new treatment for a patient. And, as usual, he expected to spend personal time sitting on hold waiting to appeal the decision. But what startled him was the conversation that took place when he finally got through to a live human being. In this podcast, Schlozman—a 1994 graduate of the Brown-Dartmouth Program in Medicine—recounts what happened in this "rare and truly honest moment."

This is a web extra to an article that appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Dartmouth Medicine Magazine. To read the article, go to:
http://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/summer09/html/point_of_view/

Dartmouth undergrad examines opioid death toll

Conducting the first comprehensive analysis of prescription opioid-related deaths in New Hampshire presented some special challenges for Laura Hester, a geography major in the Dartmouth College Class of 2009. It involved driving an hour each way from Hanover, N.H., to the Chief Medical Examiner's Office in Concord almost every other day for two months in the winter. It required combing through the 1,500 death certificates from 2003 to 2007 that were loosely classified as involving "toxic substances" in order to find the 488 deaths that were due to prescription opioids. And since the certificates exist only in paper form, it required hours and hours of data entry. But all that hard work yielded a "high-quality" database, says her advisor, and an "excellent" and "very ambitious" senior honors thesis.

This is a web extra to an article that appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Dartmouth Medicine Magazine. To read the article, go to:
http://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/summer09/html/vs_briefs/

Talking about health-care reform

Everyone—from the Obama administration to your friends and neighbors—is talking about health-care reform. So in the Summer 2009 issue of Dartmouth Medicine magazine, alumni of Dartmouth Medical School from across the country answered questions about their practices and the changes they'd like to see made to the nation's health-care system.

To find out more about what Americans who are patients rather than physicians are saying on this topic, Dartmouth Medicine spoke to people on the streets of White River Junction, Vt., and Hanover, N.H. They mentioned the wide array of medical challenges they face and discussed their priorities and concerns as the nation moves toward health-care reform.

This is a web extra to an article that appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Dartmouth Medicine Magazine. To read the article, go to:
http://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/summer09/html/road_to_reform/

Surviving cancer

P.J. Hamel, a senior editor at King Arthur Flour Company, headquartered in Norwich, Vt., describes herself professionally as a "baker and blogger." She writes the King Arthur catalog, creates recipes, has written cookbooks, and blogs about baking on the company's website.

And personally Hamel is, among many other roles, a cancer survivor--she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001 and over the next nine months had surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. She began blogging about cancer as well, shortly after her diagnosis.

Writing, she says, is a thread that has run through her entire life. In a feature for the Spring 2009 issue of Dartmouth Medicine, titled "My Story," she shared the experiences and emotions of being diagnosed with and treated for cancer.

This is a web extra to an article that appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Dartmouth Medicine Magazine. To read the article, go to:
http://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/spring09/html/my_story.php

A Patron of Positivity

The summer after her first year of medical school, Dr. Julia Nordgren worked with Dr. Judy Frank, conducting research and shadowing Frank on rounds in the neonatal intensive care unit. What she learned from Frank changed her outlook on both medicine and life. "Judy Frank was clearly no ordinary woman in medicine," Nordgren says. In this podcast, originally published as an essay in the Spring 2009 issue of Dartmouth Medicine, Nordgren reflects on how her experiences that summer shaped her own career as a woman in medicine.

This is a web extra to an article that appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Dartmouth Medicine Magazine. To read the article, go to:
http://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/spring09/html/point_of_view.php

Lee Witters discusses the discovery of insulin

One early prescription for diabetes involved drinking a pint and a half of milk for breakfast, eating rancid meat for dinner, and using hog's lard as skin lotion. Actually, explains Dr. Lee Witters, this treatment did some good simply by causing patients to eat less (no one likes rancid meat, after all).

The discovery of insulin, which paved the way for more effective diabetes treatments, was one of the great advances in medical history, and it makes for quite a story. In this video, Witters discusses diabetes in ancient societies, the first descriptions of the disease, the medical revolution that resulted from isolating insulin, and much more.

The lecture in the video was originally delivered as a session in the Dartmouth Community Medical School (DCMS) and is presented as a Dartmouth Medicine web-extra with the kind permission of the DCMS. For more information about the Dartmouth Community Medical School, visit http://dms.dartmouth.edu/dcms/.

This is a web extra to an article that appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Dartmouth Medicine Magazine. To read the article, go to:
http://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/winter08/html/diabetes_detectives.php