America's "shining" women and why it's so hard to cure cancer?

I've been reading Radium Girls: the dark story of America's shining women. It's a heartbreaking story about watch-dial painters in Orange, NJ and Ottawa, IL during the 1920's. Radium derivatives were believed to have restorative properties, even while other's warned of the dangers of pure radium, but the women weren't cautioned or even told about the dangerous materials they were working with, and how they were interacting with them. What's even more amazing is that at least one of these sites is still being reclaimed today, 91 years later. 

Many women and other workers at these plants came down with very rare and unusual cancers. While the video below isn't about radium, it does get at the heart of another issue: why is is so hard to cure cancer?

Holy graphic medicine, Batman!

Michael Green is one of the most influential proponents of using comics in medical education. His illustrated story of a missed diagnosis was the first in a series of graphic medicine comics that are now routinely published in Annals of Internal Medicine. 

What is graphic medicine and how can it be used to help train future physicians? Talk a look at this video just published in AAMC News. 

Body clocks and the 2017 Nobel Prize for Medicine

Thanks to Elissa Kinzelman-Vesely for today's WHSLA blog post idea!
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Read more from NPR about Hall, Rosbach, and Young's research here: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/10/02/555054483/how-messing-with-our-body-clocks-can-raise-alarms-with-health

Read the official Nobel Prize press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2017/press.html

Hygge, happiness, and a dark side

You might have seen or heard about the "hygge", a Danish and Norwegian word that's getting a lot of attention these days. Hygge (pronouced hoo-ga) loosely translates to coziness. 

I read Meiki Wiking's book, The little book of hygge: Danish secrets to happy living, a few months ago and really enjoyed it. 

Wiking's 2016 TED talk takes us a bit further into happiness, by talking about it's dark side: suicide. He highlights research suggesting that all this talk about happiness, could actually make us unhappy. See what you think. It's intrigued me enough to read more about the flip side of happiness.