jjablkowski's blog

Dr Mark Elliott’s article in the BCMJ’s January/February issue is an earnest, simplified, yet still confounding explanation of CRISPR,[1] an emerging genetic manipulation procedure for patients suffering from certain genetic mutations, including sickle cell anemia and thalassemia. The article is meant for nongeneticist physicians who wish to explain to enquiring patients what the CRISPR procedure is, what it can offer, and what are its practical, ethical, and legal limits.

A few weeks ago, while standing in a lineup for toilet tissue, my friend, standing 6 feet away, turned to me laughing, and said, “You know, in 1973 the comedian Johnny Carson read some false information about toilet paper shortages, and cracked a couple jokes about it on his Tonight Show.” In the following weeks customers flooded stores buying rolls and rolls of toilet paper, leaving empty shelves, which reinforced the rumor that the US was running out of toilet paper.

During my first few months of general practice in North Vancouver in the mid-1950s, one of the senior internal-medicine doctors asked me if I could make a daily short visit to one of his patients while he was away for couple of weeks. The patient was a young woman, slowly dying with mitral valve endocarditis. She was more or less isolated in an oxygen tent in the middle of a 10-bed ward waiting for her death. In those days there was not much more that could be done for her. The senior physician put his hand on my shoulder and said, “your visits will help her, use your bedside manner.” 

The BC Cancer Breast Screening Program will resume screening mammography services in select screening centre sites in June. The introduction of screening mammography will occur in a measured, phased approach: each site will work with downstream diagnostic services to ensure there is capacity for follow-up procedures, as well as sufficient personal protective equipment on hand before resuming services.

In the early 1970s I received a small grant to conduct a consultation on the air with a volunteer couple in Victoria. This was something very new. I was broadcasting from a room at the BC Tel (now Telus) office in Vancouver, and the couple was receiving to and responding from a similar technical set up in Victoria. In those days TV transmissions had to be line-of-sight (i.e., the transmitting and receiving stations had to be in view of each other). There were four technicians in my room twirling dials, counting down to when I could start, and a similar crew was handling the Victoria side.