“Remembrance of things past is not the remembrance of things as they were” wrote Marcel Proust. Vladimir Nabokov observed “The more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes.”
30-some years ago during fellowship training a visiting physician from Ireland ordered phototherapy “on for 4 hours, off for 4 hours”…..which puzzled us. During NICU rounds the big-boss (Dr. Fred Battaglia, a phototherapy skeptic who battled Jerry Lucey over its safety) blistered all who questioned the Eire guest. Not because anyone was impolite,…..rather, it was impolitic. Dr. Battaglia thought phototherapy was a reckless therapy, and perhaps safer given in circumscribed, cycled fashion.
Cody Arnold and colleagues (attached) have studied cycled phototherapy,……do their findings vindicate Dr. Battaglia? BTW, a fine first sentence from Dr. Arnold.
About 10 years ago I listened to her plead with a PAS audience that “….being a mother of a sick premature infant prematurely ages women, it changes their chromosomes.” Then we listened to 2 prominent neonatologists deride her position re: pregnancy, extreme prematurity and women’s rights,…..it was unsettling,……unforgettable. Helen Harrison(1947-2015) was brave, compassionate, sharp, and witty in conversation. Helen would have read with interest the second attachment re: telomere length and SES.
“Where does a thought go when its forgotten?” asked Sigmund Freud.
Joe Kaempf, MD
District VIII Member Extraordinaire
Portland, OR
Volume 12, Number 39