Shout Outs

Updated 3/2017-- photos and all links (except to my own posts) removed as many no longer active. and it was easier than checking each one.

Teen Health 411 is this week's host of Grand Rounds. You can read this week’s edition here (photo credit).

Welcome to Grand Rounds 6.13 and blessings from Teen Health 411 for your holidays (the bizarre ones were provided by my teenagers) which may include: Hanukkah, Solstice, Boxing Day, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Years, St. Lucia, National Date Nut Bread Day, Pumpkin Pie Day, International Children's Day, Go Caroling Day, Saturnalia, Humbug Day, Bathtub Party Day, National Noodle Ring Day, Eggnog Day, and Repeal Day (which FYI undid prohibition)!

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  H/T to @ctsinclair for the link to this story:  Hospice Santa volunteers face grief, kids' hard questions by Marcia Manna Special for, USA TODAY (photo credit)

A Santa Claus volunteer leans in for a girl who just received a candy cane at a hospice care center. John Scheuch, Santa-America's executive director, says these kids sometimes ask difficult questions. "I visited a 6-year-old who asked Santa, 'What is it going to be like when I die?' After a gulp and a deep breath I said, 'I don't really know, but I do know you will not be hurting or in pain anymore and that can only be more pleasant.' Then we spoke of other things."

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H/T to @ChrisCoppola for this amazing story from the LA Times:  Wounded soldier's shattered pancreas gets replaced in a whole new way

On Tuesday, Dr. Camillo Ricordi, director of the University of Miami's Diabetes Research Institute, told the story of a long-distance islet cell transplant …... The transplant involved flying Porfirio's shattered pancreas — now removed — from an operating room at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital in Washington to Ricordi's specialized laboratory, more than 1,000 miles away, at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine. ………

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Interesting article from WSJ Health Blog:  How to Create More Organ Donors: Sweeten the Deal  by Jacob Goldstein

Getting more people to become organ donors would save lives, but driving up the number of donors is tough.

Israel, which has an unusually low rate of organ donation, is about to try a new tack. Starting next year, people who volunteer to donate their organs when they die will be higher on the waiting list if they ever need a transplant.

There are lots of details (see below), but the basic idea here is interesting. …………

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Jessica, Endless Knots, wrote a nice post:  Self and non-self: Voices of MS and in a follow-up post reports that the edition has sold out.  Here is a short segment from the first post:

It's not easy to write about illness. Writing "Feeling Numb," my essay, which originally appeared in Ars Medica and whose excerpt appears in this volume, was the second most difficult writing I can remember (the most, my mother's eulogy). I never wanted to write about it, recalling the details too painful, waiting for the words to come close to excruciating, but, at a friend's urging, I forced myself. When the first draft was done, written by hand, itself a departure from nearly everything I've ever written, I put it in a pile of unfinished material (now about a foot tall) and tried to forget about it……

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A good post from David Gorski, Science-Based Medicine , discussing the risks/benefits of medical imaging:  Radiation from medical imaging and cancer risk.

……..However, if there’s one area where even physicians tend to forget that there is potential risk involved, it’s the area of diagnostic tests, in particular radiological diagnostic tests, such as X-rays, fluoroscopy, computed tomography (CT) scans, and the variety of ever more powerful diagnostic studies that have proliferated over since CT scans first entered medical practice in the 1970s. …….

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Doc Gurley gives us her 3rd Annual Guide Homeless Gift Guide:

with tips for how you too can safely give an affordable, life-saving gift to the neediest among us. Because when it comes to the homeless, that's when, truly, The Giving Is Easy. And once you see how simple and rewarding it can be to drop a gift with a homeless person, be sure to pass the word along. Email friends, post your efforts on Facebook or MySpace. Put together gifts to have in your car for those awkward moments when you're waiting at an intersection, staring at a scrawled "anything helps, even a smile" cardboard sign. It will change the whole tenor of your life.

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There will be no Dr Anonymous’ show this week.