Showing results by author "Clifton K. Meador" in All Categories

Fascinomas - fascinating medical mysteries. A paralyzed teen recovers overnight. A woman complains her breast implants speak. A man and his dog become gravely ill at the exact same time. These strange real-life cases and many more can be found in author and physician Clifton K. Meador's newest collection, Fascinomas. Combining the word fascinating with the term for a tumor or growth, fascinoma is medical slang for an unusually interesting medical case.

For years after graduating from medical school, Dr. Clifton K. Meador assumed that symptoms of the body, when obviously not imaginary, indicate a disease of the body - something to be treated with drugs, surgery, or other traditional means. But, over several decades, as he saw patients with clear symptoms but no discernible disease, he concluded that his own assumptions were too narrow and, indeed, that the underlying basis for much of clinical medicine was severely limited.

Modern technology has given rise to electronic medical records, remote monitoring systems, and satellite-enabled real-time examinations in which patient and physician might be separated by thousands of miles. Yet, when it comes to diagnosing difficult cases, the clinician's strongest asset might just be one of the oldest tools of the medical profession - careful listening.

For a boy coming of age during the 1930s and '40s, Greenville, Alabama, a small cotton-farming town in the Deep South, was a wonderfully rich environment. Greenville may have been small, but for author Clifton K. Meador, MD, life growing up there was anything but dull. In his memoir Sketches of a Small Town: Circa 1940, Meador lovingly retells the stories that formed his values and shaped his life.