Psychobabble
mementomori | December 30, 2007"What Is Assertiveness?: Assertiveness is the ability to express one's feelings and assert one's rights while respecting the feelings and rights of others. Assertive communication is appropriately direct, open and honest, and clarifies one's needs to the other person."
"What Are the Benefits of Assertiveness?: Assertiveness affects many areas of life. Assertive people tend to have fewer conflicts in their dealings with others, which translates into much less stress in their lives. They get their needs met (which also means less stressing over unmet needs), and help others get their needs met…
mementomori | December 27, 2007In addition to heart disease, hypertension, cancer and diabetes, obesity has been linked to sleep apnea, job absenteeism, bad breath, even isolated findings such as an increased risk of dying from prostate cancer after definitive treatment.
Wouldn't most of us agree that it is in our best health interests to keep our weight down? Okay, and wouldn't all of us agree that we gain weight by putting things inside of our mouths and then swallowing them? And don't these things contain nutrients that, if swallowed in excess of what is needed for metabolism, are stored in our bodies as adipose…
mementomori | December 26, 2007I've been trying to think of some New Year's Resolutions that are germane to living in our modern world (this is just a polite way of saying "Grow up! You can't spend your entire life living like you did when your were fifteen"). Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed being a teenager, but am even happier that I am now old enough to reflect on how to refine my delicate existence on Mother Earth, rather than just worry about where my next pizza is coming from.
It's time to abandon any hope of salvaging 2007 from the savages of our critics. Those of us who have not used this year wisely, who have…
mementomori | June 10, 2007[Editor's Note - the management and staff of "The Cheerful Oncologist, Inc." wish to remind the gentle reader that the following comments are only meant to be general guidelines on how to cope with a malpractice lawsuit. No matter what he implies, the C. O. is not only completely unqualified to give out legal advice, he is in fact still on the lam from a slew of parking tickets acquired during his college days, thereby making him a fugitive from both justice and humility.]
Always one to kibitz, I was hit this weekend with the notion of giving out a bit of highly biased advice on how to cope…
mementomori | August 25, 2006[Editor's Note: the following anecdotes were selected from I Love the Sound of My Own Voice: Twaddle and Bromides from The Cheerful Oncologist, published by Venal Literary Infatuations Press, 2006. The author has asked me to announce that first editions will be available as soon as his secretary is finished with the copy machine.]
I leaned up against the exam table, inspecting a woman who had finished a course of aggressive chemotherapy and chest radiation therapy for limited-stage small cell lung cancer. She still had some areas of increased 18-FDG uptake on her follow-up PET scan, but…