Steven D. Levitt's father Michael Levitt<p><a href="http://www.med.umn.edu/gi/faculty/vamc/home.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.med.umn.edu/gi/faculty/vamc/home.html</a><p><a href="http://www.mayoclinic.org/news2009-rst/5207.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.mayoclinic.org/news2009-rst/5207.html</a><p>is a medical doctor and academic researcher in medicine at the University of Minnesota. I used to file his grant applications into the office file drawers as a duty of my part-time job while pursuing my undergraduate degree. Michael Levitt is perhaps the world's leading authority on intestinal gas and still has an active research program in diseases of the human bowel. He indeed has seen many patients at a research hospital over the years, the same hospital where my mother worked as a nurse for most of her career.<p>Dr. Levitt writes in the submitted article, "Overnight admission to the hospital is recommended for 'observation' and rest prior to the trip home. Fifty years of experience have taught me that admission to an academic hospital is not restful. I have stopped counting the patients who want to be discharged to get some rest." I have an immediate family member who was given excellent care at the same academic hospital Dr. Levitt knows so well. My relative is in excellent health now decades after that treatment. But indeed, even with best care, the patient experience at a research hospital is not restful, as world experts on the patient's case vie with medical students and a variety of other health science trainees and practitioners to learn from the patient. When a case is puzzling, as was the case of my relative, research-oriented practitioners are curious about how to understand the case, trying to find established, verified practice to help the patient, and otherwise working "empirically" (an ominous word--to me--used by my relative's main doctor to describe a procedure he attempted when he wasn't sure what to do next) to do whatever they can to help.<p>As the father of a daughter, I can hardly imagine a rougher kind of news to hear. Another immediate relative lost a fiancee to cancer years ago, and that relative's memories of that time are full of frustration. The various kinds of cancer are still so varied--as mentioned in the article--that there is essentially NIL prospect of ever having a general treatment that will be an effective first-line treatment for most forms of cancer. Instead, there will continue to be surgical treatment for come cancers, a growing variety of chemotherapies for a variety of cancers, in the best luck genome-matched to vulnerable cancer cell strains, and radiation treatment for other cancers.<p>Ultimately, though, we will all have to learn to die better,<p><a href="http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/11/30/how-doctors-die/read/nexus/" rel="nofollow">http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/11/30/how...</a><p>because we will all eventually die of something. Meanwhile, if you are a parent, this submission is a reminder to cherish your children while they are here, and if you are a medical researcher, as Michael Levitt is, this is a reminder to continue to strive for better understanding of health and disease, while remembering the patient experience as new tests and treatments are devised.