Tag: Mayo Clinic
‘Be Mine’ Shows the Trump Era Through Frank Bascombe’s Eyes
Half a century ago, at the 1974 Adelaide Festival of Arts, in South Australia, John Updike delivered a muscular manifesto: “We must write where we stand,” he said. “An imitation of the life we know, however narrow, is our only ground.” His call for accurate and specific witness, for a realism dedicated to the here and now, was surely in part an apology for the repeat appearances of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the former high-school-basketball star Updike called his “ticket to
Did a Famous Doctor’s COVID Shot Make His Cancer Worse?
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n September 22 of last year, Michel Goldman, a Belgian immunologist and one of Europe’s best-known champions of medical research, walked into a clinic near his house, rolled up his sleeve, and had a booster shot delivered to his arm. He knew he’d need it more than most.
Just a few weeks earlier, Michel, 67, had been to see his younger brother, Serge, the head of nuclear medicine at the hospital of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where both
Is America Simply Sicker Now?
The most haunting memory of the pandemic for Laura, a doctor who practices internal medicine in New York, is a patient who never got COVID at all. A middle-aged man diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer in 2019, he underwent surgery and a round of successful chemotherapy and was due for regular checkups to make sure the tumor wasn’t growing. Then the pandemic hit, and he decided that going to the hospital wasn’t worth the risk of getting COVID. So
America’s Flu-Shot Problem Is Also Its Next COVID Problem
About 18 years ago, while delivering a talk at a CDC conference, Gregory Poland punked 2,000 of his fellow scientists. Ten minutes into his lecture, a member of the audience, under Poland’s instruction, raced up to the podium with a slip of paper. Poland skimmed the note and looked up, stony-faced. “Colleagues, I am unsure of what to say,” he said. “We have just been notified of a virus that’s been detected in the U.S. that will take somewhere between