Monday, August 18, 2008
Pall-pourri
1)
Journal of Clinical Oncology has a lovely 'art of oncology' case discussion about arranging for a (slowly dying) young boy who was receiving hospice care to attend preschool - all the issues & challenges involved as well as the joy it brought.
2)
BMJ has a brief editorial by Nicholas Christakis decrying how poorly we do as a society in taking care of the dying, and how lack of prognostication can make things worse.
3)
Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine has a randomized, placebo-patch-controlled trial of the lidocaine patch for acute herpes zoster pain (not post-herpetic neuralgia for which it has previously been studied). It was a small study, and involved only 2 days of treatment with bid dosing of the lidocaine patch or placebo placed on non-blistered skin. Like with PHN, the patch showed a modest benefit in pain reduction over placebo.