Here's how to write a compelling introduction to a story. ST senior correspondent Chang Ai-Lien's opening anecdote is so well-crafted, the reader is hooked!...
It was a taste of medicine that Professor Tan Ser Kiat will never forget.
Doing rounds with his mentor, Professor Gordon Ransome, and fellow medical students in the 1960s, the group stopped in front of a diabetic patient.
"How do you tell if someone has diabetes? You taste their pee," said Prof Ransome, who dipped his hand into the man's urine bag and licked a finger in front of the horrified bunch.
The squirming students mirrored his action, only to be told after each had a sampling that he had put one finger into the acrid liquid, but a different one into his mouth.
"He was teaching us the importance of observations, one of the most important lessons in medicine," recalled Prof Tan, chuckling.
[Prof Tan, 66, went on to cover the whole spectrum of medical care: From his early days as an orthopaedic surgeon revolutionising treatments to re-attach severed limbs, to running SingHealth, the country's largest healthcare group, for the past 12 years. Recently retired as the group's CEO, he is still active in practising medicine.]
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'Early diagnosis is the sickness' (TODAY, 29 Feb, page 10)
This New York Times article (hyperlinked here, below), by H. Gilbert Welch, a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice -- on the issue of overdiagnosis and overtreatment of people who are well -- is a compelling read in its entirety. Here's an extract:
The truth is, the fastest way to get heart disease, autism, glaucoma, diabetes, vascular problems, osteoporosis or cancer ... is to be screened for it. In other words, the problem is overdiagnosis and overtreatment.
Screening the apparently healthy potentially saves a few lives (although the National Cancer Institute could not find any evidence for this in its recent large studies of prostate and ovarian cancer screening). But it definitely drags many others into the system needlessly - into needless appointments, needless tests, needless drugs and needless operations (not to mention all the accompanying needless insurance forms).
This process does not promote health; it promotes disease. People suffer from more anxiety about their health, from drug side effects, from complications of surgery. A few die. And remember: These people felt fine when they entered the health care system.
It was not always like this. In the past, doctors made diagnoses and initiated therapy only in patients who were experiencing problems. Of course, we still do that today. But increasingly we also operate under the early diagnosis precept: Seeking diagnosis and initiating therapy in people who are not experiencing problems.
http://www.todayonline.com/Commentary/EDC120229-0000016/Early-diagnosis-is-the-sickness
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Leap Year footnote... when something goes awry.
Here's the insing.com story for the pic above:
http://news.insing.com/tabloid/taxis-rush-to-adjust-fare-meters-for-leap-year/id-98343f00
I too was a victim of a Leap Year glitch. My trusty watch went straight to 1 March, skipping 29 Feb!
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