Sen. Arlen Specter’s field hearing on the Philadelphia VA mess is set to begin today. It will be interesting to see if any new details will come out. Apparently, Dr. Kao will be answering questions at the hearing, so at least we will hear his side of the story. Before the spinning starts, though, we [...]
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It’s always nice when one of your favorite bloggers writes about one of your favorite subjects. PalMD has been writing a series of blog posts discussing the basics of the biology and treatment of cancer. His latest post is an overview of radiation therapy. As usual, he does a good job explaining difficult concepts in [...] The Philadelphia VA hospital story has really taken off. Usually when there is a high profile radiation therapy accident, like with the unfortunate Lisa Norris, the interest dies off fairly quickly. However, in this case, the interest seems to be just beginning to ramp up. A story that had been brewing for months has finally broken into the mainstream media; the New York Times reports on a series of botched procedures at a V.A. hospital in Philadelphia. While regulatory agencies had some clue that things were awry, the clinic was allowed to continue operating on patients for six years before [...] I’m still tied up with the annual calibration on one of our accelerators, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. In the meantime, here are a few updates on the Molybdenum-99 shortage. The American College of Radiology has posted an article from Reuters describing some of the ways that US [...] We’re going back to the 80′s with this biweek’s installation of one star Mondays. It’s that favorite of Karaoke bars and American Idol semi-finalists: Total Eclipse of the Heart. This is one of those songs, like All Along the Watchtower, in which the cover surpasses the original. However, in this case, the song is so [...] Nothing is finer in life than sitting in your recliner, watching sports on TV and eating fried, lard encrusted food. Surprisingly, it turns out that it may have some serious health consequences. No, I’m not talking about the obesity epidemic. I’m talking about radioactive La-Z-Boys. In 1998, an Indiana company unknowingly used metal contaminated with [...] The last post in this series showed how a linear accelerator is used to create a beam of radiation. Now we will talk about how we can conform the beam to the shape of the tumor we are trying to treat while blocking the beam from irradiating normal tissue. Once the beam is generated, it [...] Things have been so busy lately that I forgot to post an awful song yesterday. On each of our accelerators we are required to perform an annual calibration. This takes quite a bit of time and obviously cannot be performed during patient treatment hours. That means a lot of nights and weekends. Working on and [...] A health crisis is currently underway, with barely any coverage in the American media. Over half of the world’s supply of molybdenum-99, an isotope used to generate radiopharmaceuticals for medical imaging procedures, is created in a single nuclear reactor in Chalk River, Ontario. The reactor shut down in November 2007 due to safety concerns, and [...] |
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