Talking Medicine

Complementary and alternative medicine patients are talking about: lycopene.

Language and medicine: thinking and talking about Alzheimer's disease.

The scene is familiar to most physicians: the doctor, the daughter, and the patient, a woman in her 80s. The history and physical are completed. The patient is old, and her body is beginning to fail. She is forgetful. At some point, the daughter asks the question: “Doctor, is this Alzheimer’s disease?” There are many possible answers. I never say “yes”; sometimes I say “no”; mostly, though, I a...

Doctor-patient relationship in oncological illness: the "talking medicine".

For any physician, sympathetic interaction with his/her patients should remain a central concern. It is his/her task to understand the patient's hopes, fears, anxieties and social situation, as well as to understand himself and his own motives and attitudes, which can often be identified as helplessness. Continually advancing technology, rationalization, time, and the pressure for success leave...

Complementary and alternative medicine patients are talking about: black cohosh.

OCTOBER 2005 • VOLUME 9, NUMBER 5 • CLINICAL JOURNAL OF ONCOLOGY NURSING CDR Colleen O. Lee, RN, MS, AOCN ®, is a practice assessment program manager in the Offi ce of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD. (Mention of specifi c products and opinions related to those products do not indicate or imply endorsement by the Clinical Journal of...

Complementary and alternative medicine patients are talking about: PC-SPES.

Digital Object Identifier: 10.1188/05.CJON.113-114 PC-SPES is an herbal supplement containing eight Chinese herbs (see Table 1). PC stands for prostate cancer, and spes is Latin for hope. PC-SPES was formulated according to traditional Chinese medicine principles involving ingredients that may counteract cytotoxic agents, minimize toxicity, and reduce the development of drug resistance in targe...