BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Tag: health

  • The small c: Stern & Imus

    33 comments on The small c: Stern & Imus
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    I just did an interview about my cancer with Steve Langford from Howard 100 News, who really is an intrepid reporter. I told him I could certainly not describe the full details of going through this with other media outlets (not that a single one of them would care) because it’s just too, well, explicit. So, of course, Steve then demanded those dirty details, starting with the harpoon shots into me that I blogged about yesterday (hint: it’s a rear-guard action). I still spared Steve the atmospherics of my MRI with a foot-long magnetic coil also shoved up there. Some things are too much even for Stern fans. And I’ll tell you the Viagra story later.

    When Steve mentioned my blog post today on the air, he said, Howard expressed his concern and I’m grateful for that. Yesterday, I wrote about living the public life and no one has perfected that better than Howard. He – more than blogs – has taught me about transparency.

    One of the things I am valuing most in the phenomenal response I’ve been getting since yesterday – besides, of course, the wonderful good wishes from so many of you – is the candor I get from folks who’ve had this experience. One friend sent me email with frank advice about sex; it takes guts to talk about that with others and so I’m grateful he was willing to. A few others have let me know how they pee (thanks, guys).

    I told Langford that I wanted to get advice from Stern producer Gary Dell’Abate because, on the show, he very publicly went through the ordeal of having a stent stuck up his penis because of kidney stones. Because he’s already shared every detail on the radio, I figured he’d be straight with me. Get this: Gary called me to assure me that it was irritating but didn’t hurt; getting it taken out was incredibly strange, though. He didn’t hesitate to share with me because he already lives so much in public.

    Living in public is good.

    But there are exceptions. Don Imus may be one of them.

    I had joked that one of the worst parts of getting prostate cancer is that I share an ailment with Don Imus when I’m a Stern fan.

    But, hey, now that we’re brothers in malignancy, I at least wondered what treatment Imus had selected from the menu – radiation, radioactive seeds, surgery, robotic surgery, or just watching – so I searched online before Langford called (then maybe I could have him speculate on Imus’ impotence and incontinence rather than mine).

    I was shocked to find that Imus is apparently talking about treating his cancer with peppers. Peppers. By this logic, people in Mexico, China, Thailand, and Hungary should never get cancer because they eat so many peppers. Yeah, science spends billions looking for the cure for cancer and I trust Imus to find it?

    Indeed, a 2006 study found that an ingredient in certain peppers has been found to inhibit the growth of prostate cancer cells. But it has not been tested in humans. Lycopene, an ingredient in tomatoes, also helps reduce PSA. But I’m not going on the ketchup cure.

    If Imus is seriously – and so publicly – spreading the notion that eating peppers will cure him, I fear it could jeopardize people who think that they can avoid diagnosis and treatment for a deadly – but curable – disease. Because he is on the radio, what he says gets used and spread (I hesitate to link to the guy promulgating this pepper thing but here it is).

    I’m going to tell jokes about my cancer, as best I can, and share my experience when I think it might be of interest. I don’t intend to drown you in sorrow and seriousness. But take this advice seriously: Don’t take medical advice from a talk show host – or a blogger – just because they have a platform to spread it. The virtue of publicness has its limits.

  • The small c and me

    307 comments on The small c and me
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    I have cancer, prostate cancer.

    When the doctor told me, he said that if you’re going to get it, this is the one to get. It made feel as if I’d just gotten an upgrade on Cancer Air. It was caught very early, found in only 5 percent of one of 12 samples gathered by shooting a harpoon gun into me (where, you don’t want to know). So I am lucky.

    I’m reminded of a brainstorming session I went to with Tony Hendra, the comedy writer, toward the end of the ’80s, when he was leading the collaborative writing of a book called The ’90s: A Look Back. I was invited to a session where we speculated about the near future of medicine and Tony riffed about what it would be like once they found a pill to care cancer. “Got a spot of cancer today?” he said, copyrighting. “No problem. Take Tumorout. You’ll feel as good as new. Go ahead. Light up that cigarette. Won’t hurt a bit.” I was disappointed that his cancer gag didn’t make it into the book. I’m also disappointed that they didn’t invent Tumorout.

    Why am I even telling you about this? As I wrote in What Would Google Do?, I gained tremendous benefit sharing another ailment – heart arrhythmia – here on my blog. And so I have no doubt that by sharing this, I will get useful advice and warm support (and maybe a few weeks’ respite from trolls). I argue for the benefits of the public life. So I’d better live it.

    I also hope to be one more guy to convince you men to get get your PSA checked: a small mitzvah in return for my luck. And when we talk about the cost of screening in the health-care debate, I’ll stand up to say that when you’re the 1-in-100, screening is worth it.

    I’ve always been a cancerphobe; can’t imagine much worse than that creeping invasion. Yet I’ve surprised myself, staying calm in the face of realizing my fears, probably because I know it could be worse and, well, it is what it is. I’ve been using this amazing internet to do research and, with my wife’s help and counsel, make the complicated decision on a course of treatment.

    Before doing my research, I’d assumed that the treatment Rudy Giuliani made famous – radioactive seeds – would be the way to go: simple, and if it doesn’t work, I thought, then I could resort to surgery. But it turns out that once you get zapped, it becomes very tricky to perform surgery. At my age – young, damnit – the wiser course is surgery, cutting out the prostate and, one hopes, all the disease with it.

    I’m opting for robotic surgery – geek that I am, how could I not? My only fear is that they’ll wheel me into the O.R. and I’ll see that the machine is powered by Dell.

    I’ve also chosen Sloan Kettering and Dr. Raul Parra to do the surgery. There’s one of the privileges of living in New York, among the best.

    I’ll keep you informed as I find notes of interest while progressing toward surgery in mid-September and through recovery. Fear not, I’m not going to turn this into a disease journal: I don’t expect you to be consumed with my problems when others have theirs, far worse. Or perhaps you should fear, for instead, I will keep on writing about media wonkishness: about the rise of the next media and the fall of the last. Except now, I’ll be in a worse mood.

  • Health-insurance stagnation

    22 comments on Health-insurance stagnation
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    America’s health care system – or lack of one – leads to a stifling of economic innovation and mobility. Consider:

    * Daniel Taghioff argues that people are more likely to risk starting new enterprises – leading to economic growth – in countries that have health safety nets.

    Turning to entrepreneurialism – would you rather risk all to start a new business in a place like the US where if you lose everything you may end up, literally, with nothing, no health-care, no decent schooling for your kids and so on? Or would you choose a society where, if all else fails, the state (or strong social networks) will take care of you? . . . The list of countries with the most new businesses per capita is full of small to medium sized countries with strong social safety nets, or small Asian countries with very high levels of social cohesion.

    * I know I didn’t quit my job until I had new health care insurance lined up, for without an employer, I wouldn’t have gotten any (and in the interim had to pay $24,000 per year in COBRA). How many people are sticking with jobs, unhappily and thus probably unproductively, just because of insurance handcuffs? What if they were freed? It would be better for them and their employers.

    * General Motors was brought down by more than its its health insurance obligations. Nonetheless, those obligations weighed heavily on the company as they do on many other companies with long legacies and large staffs.

    * I was at a WEF event yesterday at which one of the wise counsels pointed to the exacerbation of the health-care crisis that is coming with so many Americans unemployed. This, I think, will force the political issue.

    Rather than spending billions to bail out and now even buy crumbling legacy industries and crooked banks, how much more value would universal health insurance give to the economy?

    What if, instead of bailing out the past and filling potholes, the government assured universal broadband access? What would that do to spur innovation and entrepreneurship and begin to reform education, which, in turn, would spur innovation? What if education were reformed to emphasis innovation over test-taking? What if investment in new companies were a high priority of the tax code?

    We are not thinking strategically enough about these issues in the political debate. We complain about companies thinking short-term but so does the nation.

  • Dr. Wow

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    Thanks to links to the post below on medicine as information, I heard from Dr. Jay Parkinson, who is starting an incredible company and platform called HelloHealth to reform the relationship between doctor and patient around (a) the patient and (b) conversation. I’ll let him tell you about it (from Poptech):


    Jay Parkinson at Pop!Tech from Jay Parkinson on Vimeo.

    As the man says at the end, it’s enough to make you wish you lived in Brooklyn to take advantage of the service. I don’t want to jinx myself, but I almost want to get sniffles to try it out.

  • In control of health

    9 comments on In control of health
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    After I wrote the chapter in my book on Googlified insurance — thanks to the wisdom of the crowd in the comments here — I tried out the ideas on a couple of insurance executives. “You may be mad,” one of them emailed later, “but you had some good ideas.” Actually, my readers did.

    I proposed a scenario in which the community of the insured gained responsibility for its own health, which would require insurance and medical companies to hand over control to them, to be fully transparent with data and information, and to provide services the community could use to improve its health and reduce its own costs.

    Let me play out two implications of this with my own health situation. First, a case of cutting costs:

    Because of my afib, I have to take Coumadin, a blood thinner. I am required to go to the medical group every 2-4 weeks for them to prick my finger and make sure the dosage is OK. In some people, it can be variable and volatile. Not in me. I’ve been on the same dosage with the same effect since I started. But they keep bugging me to come in. They yell at me.

    When I get there, I’m offended at the waste of money. There’s a nurse who sits at a computer and judges my results and then types and types and prints out a sheet. There’s an assistant who does nothing but prick my finger and then marks up that printout. It takes them two people to do what my diabetic mother does many times a day on her own. They charge me a $20 copay each time I do this. I shudder to think what they charge the insurance company. It’s like watching a government bureaucracy in white coats.

    My point: If my interests and those of my community and insurance company were aligned, I would put up a fuss and whistleblow this boondoggle. If I knew it could have an impact on my costs, I’d report this to the insurance company. If I knew my community had the power to do something about it, I’d tell my tale in a community forum and gather critical mass around imposing efficiency.

    But my interests are not aligned with the insurance company’s. They are out to screw me. They think I’m out to screw them. The doctors who are screwing us think we’re all screwing them.

    By the insurance company holding onto the power in this relationship, it screws itself. We have no interest in helping them. If, instead, they enabled the community and each of its members to take control of health and costs, if they acted as a true service to the community’s and its members’ needs, then they all would benefit — except perhaps for the unnecessary and now jobless assistant and the doctors who can no longer skim a profit on this scam.

    Second example: I’m tussling with my cardiologist about the dosage of the drug I take that stops my fibrillation (the poetically named Rythmol). I’m on a high dosage but it’s working well (knock wood). The doctor says he wants me on a lower dosage, but the last time I tried I nearly went into afib and had too many palpitations (and I couldn’t concentrate under the pressure to get my book written). The risk of the drug is that even as it stops afib, it can cause afib. The risk of not taking the high dosage is that I can go into afib — and the more you get afib, the more afib you’re going to get. The risk, either way, is getting more cumulative bouts of afib. I’ve already had enough to make me a life-insurance risk, which is to say that the condition was not sufficiently managed early on when I got it (after 9/11/2001) and before I went on Rythmol.

    [Note, as an aside, that my life insurance company is screwing me for a condition that I got from 9/11 and it’s a company run by and for military people. I wonder how they treat Iraq veterans. More on that another day.]

    There’s a health decision to be made here. It’s about balancing risks. The only way to make that decision is to look at as much clinical data as is available and judge that against the comparative risks and against my personal experience. The doctor will come to a conclusion based on his education and reading and a few minutes’ consideration in my case.

    But the decision is properly mine. My health should be under my control. It is ultimately my responsibility. But the system is not set up for me to make that decision. It is not set up to inform me or give me control.

    At Davos last year, I sat at a table with a bunch of doctors who complained about their patients going to the internet to get what they said was misinformation. They didn’t want the internet to get in the way. They wanted to remain in control. I told them they were looking at this the wrong way. Instead, I said, they should point their patients to what they though were the best resources.

    Doctors, I said, should act as curators of information for patients. That’s not what doctors do. They don’t have the means or, they’d argue, the time. Insurance companies offer some information to patients, but it’s lite and not too valuable. (Did you know you should eat less? Not smoke? Exercise? No, really?)

    If insurance companies and doctors tried to empower patients and their communities to take control of their health and the costs surrounding them, if they gave us information about both the medicine and the business of it, they might succeed. Right now, no one does.