Volume
57, Number 2
Spring 2006
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SPECIAL REPORT
Access to Sonoma County Physicians
How accessible are local physicians to Sonoma County’s 478,400 residents? What are the issues affecting access?
By Cynthia Melody
FEATURE
ARTICLES
Clinical Empathy
Editorial: The Magic Promise
“Like the twice-warmed wood chopper, when patient and
physician exert the emotional labor needed to connect
genuinely, they are later warmed by an easier course through
the illness.”
By Brien Seeley, MD
Can a Doctor Live From the Heart?
An interview with Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, the cofounder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program and the author of two bestselling books.
By Christina Tucker
Courage at the Threshold
"Dying patients can bring up our own worst fears and make us feel utterly inadequate to the task of doctoring.”
By Tom Crane, MD
The Saline Solution
“As part of this theme issue on clinical empathy, we decided to investigate the placebo effect, so we sent local physicians an informal survey.”
By Steve Osborn
Happy New Year!
“Having not voluntarily missed a meal since overcoming
being a picky eater sometime during the Carter administration,
I shivered on my couch under a blanket shunning the very thought of even a saltine cracker.”
By Mike Ismail, MD
DEPARTMENTS
Local Frontiers
Evidence and Experience on Trial
“Is evidence-based medicine really based on good evidence?
Is experience-based medicine as good as we’d like to believe?”
By Allan L. Bernstein, MD
Outside the Office
Inventing a New Career
“Twenty years ago, I left emergency medicine for a career as an inventor. I have since been very fortunate, but I have had my share of failures.”
By Roger Minkow, MD
Medical Arts
The Art of Kenny Wong
“I think few of us were aware of Kenny’s artistic talent or his sense of humor until we began seeing his work in the medical society’s monthly Bulletin.”
By F. Scott Chilcott, MD
Current Books
Biomolecular Misgivings
“As physicians we are sworn to help, to empathize, to care and care for; but it is sometimes altogether impossible. Symptoms of Unknown Origin, by Clifton Meador, MD, is a compact, folksy remedy for these difficult encounters with a seemingly alien
species.”
By Colleen Foy-Sterling, MD
SCMA: Working for you
