A Woman Of Means

With my nose to the pavement and my lantern lighting my search for a few honest men, I discovered something else - a honest woman. Regardless of what the good Dr. Dicksheet may have thought, there are just as many honest women as there are honest men to be found. However, this is the first woman that I've spotlighted on The Cynical Pharmacist.

And that honest woman is Dr. Roseanna Means, a practicing Internist in the Boston area.

Dr. Means observed that homeless women were underrepresented at the clinics she worked at and learned that using traditional health care access venues, even when staffed by doctors trained in caring for the homeless, is overwhelming for women impaired by exhaustion, mental illness and fear.

Consequently, in 1999, Dr. Means founded Women of Means, a group sending volunteer physicians into shelters to provide care where the women feel safest.

Since that time, Women of Means has grown from a single physician enterprise to an established presence in the medical landscape of Boston area shelters. Today, a team of volunteer doctors and paid nurses, representing all of the major Boston teaching hospitals, selflessly provide free medical care throughout the Greater Boston area.

Dr. Means, and the Women of Means, mission is to improve the lives of women and families who are homeless or marginally housed through quality health care, education, and advocacy.

Guided by a determination to address and improve health disparities by those who suffer severe and complex socio-economic conditions, Women of Means meets its mission by giving vulnerable women and families the "means" toward self sufficiency through improved health and health literacy.

The world is a much better place with people like Dr. Means and her team in it sharing their humanity. But, don't just take my word for it. Watch this CBS Evening News presentation about her -


Source: Boston doctor's kindness helps save homeless

Flying On One Engine

Wheelchair bound because of partial-paralysis, without a larynx, and diagnosed with a life-threatening aortic aneurysm, Indian-born Sharadkumar Dicksheet, M.D., still spent six-months of every year from 1968 until 2011, traveling to India to perform operations in marathon-like surgery sessions where many poor children received free treatment for cleft lips and other facial deformities.

Few men have sacrificed so much, and used their own hands, to help so many people.

During his lifetime he and his colleagues performed over 200,000 free reconstructive operations for the children of India. Although Dr. Dicksheet barely survived living only off of social security income while in his Brooklyn, NY apartment the other six-months of the year, his life was drastically different while in India, where the eight-time Nobel Prize nominee was treated like a living god.

At 80-years of age, Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet passed away on November 14, 2011.

But his altruistic efforts haven't gone unrecognized. The documentary, Flying On One Engine, shows how this quirky, funny, empathetic, and sometimes difficult character overcomes his own ailments by curing others. Here's the trailer -


Flying On One Engine - Trailer from Joshua Z Weinstein on Vimeo.

To memorialize Dr. Dicksheet and to continue to raise awareness about prenatal birth defects and the inequities in India's health care system, Joshua has freely posted his full documentary online.

Is There A Doctor In House?

Is diagnosis an art or a science? Physicians Lisa Sanders and John Sotos say the answer is both.

As technical advisers to the hit TV drama "House, M.D.," the two doctors are experts on the subject, having spent the last few years turning the medical science of diagnosis into art.


Source: 60 Minutes: Overtime

Trying To Get Over

Even after the too-numerous-to-count news reports coming out of the state of Florida about pill mills and prescription drug abuse over the past five-years, there's still reports of highly-educated, superfly, healthcare professionals thinking that they're going to get over on "The Man".

According to the U.S. Attorney's Middle-District Office in Florida -

Tampa, FL - U.S. Attorney Robert E. O'Neill announces that U.S. District Judge James D. Whittemore yesterday sentenced Dr. Sanjeev Grover (49, Lutz) to five years in federal prison for dispensing and distributing Oxycodone pills outside the professional scope of professional practice. He pled guilty on February 14, 2012.

According to court documents, Dr. Grover sold prescriptions for Oxycodone pills to a confidential informant and to an undercover agent on five occasions, between April and June 2011.

Dr. Grover met the confidential informant twice in a Burger King parking lot in Lutz, FL. The first sale involved four separate prescriptions, each for 60 eighty-milligram pills. The second sale included eight prescriptions, each for 180 thirty-milligram pills. On two other occasions, Dr. Grover met with the confidential informant and the undercover agent in a business center parking lot in Palm Harbor, Florida. During the first meeting, he sold six prescriptions. Four of the prescriptions were for 180 thirty-milligram pills and the other two for 180 fifteen-milligram pills. During the second meeting, he sold them twelve separate prescriptions, each for 180 thirty-milligram pills. On the fifth occasion, Dr. Grover sold six prescriptions to the undercover agent in a Walgreens parking lot in Palm Harbor. Each prescription was for 180 thirty-milligram pills.

Here's Mr. O'Neill's video report to the news media about this case -

Saving Face

SAVING FACE tells the stories of two acid-attack survivors: Zakia and Rukhsana, their arduous attempts to bring their assailants to justice, and the charitable work of London-based, Pakistani-born plastic surgeon Dr. Mohammad Jawad, who strives to help these women put this horrific act behind them and move on with their lives.

Saving face also highlights the efforts of the women across Pakistani society that are making efforts to help this vexing issue and the changes that occur from their efforts. Directed by Oscar® and Emmy®-nominated filmmaker Daniel Junge and Emmy®-winning Pakistani director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, SAVING FACE is an intimate look inside Pakistani society, illuminating each women's personal journey while showing how reformers are tackling this vexing problem.

A 2012 Academy Award Nominee For Documentary (Short Subject), SAVING FACE will broadcast internationally in 2012, beginning with HBO in North America and Channel Four in the UK.


Source: Saving Face Film

FRONTLINE: Post Mortem

Popular television shows, such as C.S.I., portray death investigators as high-tech sleuths wielding the most sophisticated tools of 21st century science. But, such investigations are not nearly the normal. An unprecedented collaborative investigation by FRONTLINE's Lowell Bergman, ProPublica and NPR found a very different reality: A dysfunctional system in which there are few standards, little oversight and the mistakes are literally buried.

"There are people out there trying to carry out death investigations and they're trying to do them the best they can, but they don't have the training, they don't have the money, they don't have the infrastructure and they don't have the skill," retired Virginia state Medical Examiner Dr. Marcella Fierro tells FRONTLINE.

You almost won't believe what's being reported. Watch FRONTLINE: Post Mortem on your local PBS television station, or watch the full version online. Here's the trailer -

Doctors Of The Darkside

The feature-length documentary, "Doctors of the Dark Side", exposes the scandal behind the torture scandal -- how psychologists and physicians devised, supervised and covered up the torture of detainees in US controlled military prisons. The stories of four detainees and the doctors involved in their torture reveal the terrible cost of putting doctors virtually in charge of detainee interrogations.

Here's a review of the film after it's premier at Georgetown University School of Law in October.

There Is No Magic Pill

What's a responsible provider to do when everyone believes a pill will cure all of their ills? There's no doubt that DTC pharmaceutical advertising and drug spam works my friends.


Magic Pill from Liam Upton on Vimeo.

ZDoggMD Calls Out The Sucker MDs

As ACynicPharmD, I think he makes a good point about the TV show docs, but you decide.

According to ZDoggMD -

He may have started out with good intentions, but his current incarnation foists hype, pseudoscience, and unproven “alternative” treatments upon millions of unsuspecting Americans who believe that his is the final word. After all, he has been duly annointed by She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named!

Source: ZDoggMD, Slightly Funnier Than Placebo

Human Body - A Short Film

A doctor, who, buffeted by the scheme of things, is unable to transcend the part assigned him by the absurdity of that existence. Because he does not lack conscious knowledge of his condition, but refuses to act in the face of his portentous freedom, the doctor, an archetype of the anti-existential hero, deserves his fate.

Lacking the human stuff necessary to create and structure situations, he permits himself to be manipulated by patients, employers, criminals, the pharmaceutical industry, and the insurance industry; but he becomes, by submitting, a tool within the situations they create.

Never, consciously, does he attempt through an overt act, until too late, to establish his own essence, to rise above any manipulative value he possesses for others. As doctor he is a thing, an object, a tool; as man he is nothing.


Menschenkörper from Tobias Frühmorgen on Vimeo.

Urology Name Fail

I'm not sure how this urologist stays in practice. It doesn't seem to me like he would have any repeat business. Maybe his other team members, Dr. Hardeman and Dr. Wang, send him their overflow patients. Via FailBlog.org.

According to The Urology Team website:

Dr. Richard (Dick) Chopp is well known in the Austin community for performing Vasectomies. He also enjoys treating patients with metabolic evolution of kidney stone disease, male endocrine urology disorders, prostate disease and Peyronie's disease.

Now, I don't know about you, but I'd be a little hesitant before I let anyone named Dick Chopp perform a vasectomy on me.

Time For An Attitude Adjustment

Life is hard, and sometimes it'll beat you down if you let it.

But, it's not always a pill that'll cure your ill.

Many times the best medicine is no medicine at all. With a little help from someone who cares about you, often all it takes is a little psychology and the right kind of motivation.


Dr Knowgood: Lion's Pride from Arnold Zwanenburg on Vimeo.

Foolish Choices

In all aspects of life, whether it's personal or professional, if you allow others the choice to take control of your life, they will. That's how most people roll.

If you freely give others power over you, the chances are that they'll abuse that power, no matter how much it harms you. Their own interests will always become paramount.

So, don't whine about the consequences of your impulsive and foolish choices afterwards. You'd be much better off thinking about those choices long and hard before you make them.

Your life may depend on it.


Source: 5-Second Films

Is This Why My Copay Is So Cheap?

I stopped over at Dr. Grumpy's House to see how he was doing today. Needless to say, I couldn't get out of there quick enough. Think I'll stop by again after he's had some lunch.


Source: Project Rant