Opinion | ‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This’: What We Heard This Week

“I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this.” — Wayne L. Furman, MD, of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, discussing impressive survival rates with an investigational treatment for high-risk neuroblastoma in kids.

“We need to think out of the box to increase their access to care.” — Becky Tilahun, PhD, of the Cleveland Clinic, on research suggesting flexible cognitive behavioral therapy over a longer period of time may benefit people with psychogenic nonepileptic seizures.

“Aspirin is taking a beating, and aspirin should take a beating.” — Dean Kereiakes, MD, of the Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, discussing trials showing successful strategies that drop aspirin for certain patients with acute coronary syndrome.

“They wanted us to view this as a rehearsal for the next pandemic. The idea was, let’s pretend this is a whole new virus. What can we do in 100 days?” — Benjamin tenOever, PhD, of NYU Langone Health, on the World Health Organization’s call to action when Omicron was discovered.

“The way I conceptualize plasmapheresis is that Waldenström is like a house that is on fire.” — Joshua Richter, MD, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, discussing the need to tackle hyperviscosity, one of the classic symptoms of Waldenström macroglobulinemia, before treating the disease itself.

“The deck is kind of stacked, if you will, on a whole number of levels. I don’t think it’s fixing one thing. I think it’s fixing a lot of different things.” — Susan Pories, MD, of Mount Auburn Hospital, discussing why female physicians are paid less over the course of their careers versus their male colleagues.

“Our primary argument with the FDA is that white bagging fundamentally circumvents the [Drug Supply Chain Security Act].” — Kyle Robb, PharmD, of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, on working to end the practice where a payer mandates that providers can only source drugs from a narrow selection of payer-affiliated specialty pharmacies.