Group items tagged

Doctors' inertia in changing practice to fit new evidence - especially in cancer screening

Even when the system works as it's supposed to, and palliative care specialists arrive like the cavalry to provide comfort care, to stop fruitless and painful interventions and to support what patients want, their own colleagues may brand them murderers. It takes strong doctors to stand up to that kind of verbal abuse, to explain that courts and ethics committees have approved care that's intended to reduce suffering, to point out that the patient's own wishes are paramount. Perhaps they have to be stronger than we know. "The culture is changing," Dr. Matlock told me. "But it's not changed yet."

Jud Newborn, a Holocaust scholar who lives in Plainview, was doing research in Munich as a graduate student in the early 1980s when he became intrigued with the story of the White Rose resistance movement. The small, student-based group wrote and printed anonymous anti-Nazi leaflets in Munich and distributed them in that city and beyond before its key members were captured and executed in 1943. Dr. Newborn, who earned a doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago, is the co-author with Annette Dumbach of a book on the White Rose and has developed a multimedia lecture on the subject. In recognition of Holocaust Remembrance Day (April 8 this year), he will present the lecture at two Long Island synagogues. The lecture will be accompanied by nearly 80 historical images, including photographs, posters and newspaper articles, as well as recorded music. Dr. Newborn may also occasionally speak with a mock-German accent when quoting Nazi officials, in the service of his White Rose presentation. (The second half of the program focuses on more contemporary figures who have acted heroically against great odds.)