Doctor Treats Cancer of Not Caring
When Dr. Lawrence Koplin, a young Los Angeles plastic surgeon, heard about an armed robbery at a Taco Bell restaurant in which the establishment’s 25-year-old manager was shot and killed, he felt a profound sense of personal loss. The manager, Leroy Moore, had been a patient of Koplin’s a year before--successfully treated for a life-threatening case of skin cancer.
Today, writing in the new issue of the Journal of the American Medical Assn., Koplin has taken his recollections about the young man a step further, urging other doctors to work harder to remember their patients as individual human beings, instead of as simple case records.
Koplin had let the memory of Moore slip into a sort of statistical category, he conceded. By coincidence, Moore had sought treatment from Koplin when the young surgeon was preparing a portfolio of cases to present to senior physicians who would determine if he could achieve coveted status as a certified specialist in plastic surgery. Because Moore’s case was difficult, risky and eventually turned out to be a complete success, Koplin had seen the record as a strong “board case,” as such patients to be used for specialty board presentation are called.
But Moore’s shooting death last May changed all that. “One of the great gifts of being a physician lies in the daily reminder of our own fragility,” Koplin wrote, “that the only difference between physician and patient is often, quite simply, ‘bad luck.’ ”
The whole thing made Koplin think of himself. Moore was 24 when Koplin treated him and the young man seemed unimpressed by the gravity of the cancer on his face. He seemed to assume he would recover completely--though his physician had grave doubts. The murder reinforced Koplin’s belief that, as a slightly younger man, he had gone through life with the same nonchalance.
“You see so many episodes like this when you are a doctor, but, every once in a while, one grabs you,” Koplin said. “Here is this kid who just had two pieces of bad luck (starting with getting cancer) in a row.”
It’s the Water
When the Sparkletts Drinking Water Corp. holds its annual Christmas party next Friday, it will represent the 15th year for an unusual wrinkle on the annual employee holiday bash. The Sparkletts affair will be attended not just by active employees but by as many as 175 retired workers--some of whom make a ritual of returning in campers from their retirement homes to visit with old friends.
The tradition was begun by Jim Arnds, the retired former president of the company, and coordinated by Ellen Trail, the company’s employee benefits manager. “They come back from Oregon, or Las Vegas,” she said. “Especially for people who still live here, it’s one of the big events of the year, to be able to see the people they knew when they worked here.”
The party will take place at Pikes Verdugo Oaks restaurant in Glendale and Trail thinks about a dozen long-distance retirees will show up in their motor homes, having made the trek yet again. Observed Trail: “It’s quite a big deal for them.”
Blowing Smoke
A Michigan public-health expert thinks he has a great new way to try to make cigarette smokers butt out, but a California anti-smoking crusader isn’t so sure.
It all centers around a proposal by Dr. Lewis Margolis of the University of Michigan School of Public Health that a 1-cent deposit for each cigarette butt be added to the cost of a pack of cigarettes. The deposit would be refunded to anyone who turned butts in to established collection and redemption centers.
Margolis, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, says he thinks the plan would reduce litter and cut smoking by effectively raising the price of cigarettes by 20 or 25 cents a pack--depending on the number of cigarettes packaged.
But Dr. Terry Reynolds of San Bernardino, chairman of the tobacco and cancer task force of the local division of the American Cancer Society, isn’t so sure. “Doctors propose strange things,” he said with a sigh after listening to an explanation of Margolis’ plan.
The problem as Reynolds sees it is that the deposit refund would eventually come to serve as a discount on the price of cigarettes, not a surcharge. “My gut reaction,” he said, “is that this would decrease the cost of smoking by a penny a cigarette and we believe that if we keep jacking up the cost, fewer people will smoke.”
