The Drama of Diagnosis

Singer and songwriter Huey Lewis, who charted many hits with his band Huey Lewis and the News and sold more than 30 million records,  recently disclosed that he suffers from Meniere's Disease, an extremely challenging illness which affects the inner ear and causes hearing impairment, as well as vertigo. With music as his primary interest and vocation, this is a very punishing problem and has brought his music career to a screeching halt. A severe episode struck 2 years ago during a performance in Dallas when he suddenly had hearing loss in both ears, expressed mostly by auditory distortion.  It caused him to sing out of tune. “It was the worst night of my life,” he said. The band’s tour was abruptly cancelled.

DR. CLIFF MEGERIAN, an otolaryngologist, also known as an ear, nose and throat doctor, is able to explain how Meniere's damages hearing functions and causes spells of vertigo. He is the president and soon-to-be CEO of University Hospitals System, a more than $4 billion comprehensive health system and one of the top networks of hospitals in the state of Ohio with more than 26,00 employees. He also serves as a professor of head and neck surgery at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

Dr. Megerian co-founded University Hospital’s cochlear implant program, and he and his team have performed over 1,000 cochlear implant surgeries, making it one of the largest programs in the country. His clinical career has been devoted to the management of hearing loss, chronic ear diseases, vertigo and other otological and neurological issues.

Superstar quaterback John Elway recently shared his experiences with Dupuytren's Contracture which afflicts the hands. As one who built his career using his hands, this was an especially confounding and cruel illness by the way it froze his fingers in a bent position. He said on the NBC "Today" Show that "For me not to be able to pick up a football, that was an emergency."

This illness doesn't strike suddenly. It's a progressive problem, one that the late US President Ronald Reagan also suffered.

DR. PHILIP BLAZAR is a hand and upper extremity expert who sheds tremendous light on Dupuytren's contracture in this conversation.  He practices at the top-rated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.  He's also an associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School, and he's the director for the Harvard Hand and Upper Extremity Surgery Fellowship. In 2019, he was named a top doctor by Boston Magazine and by Castle Connolly which offers rankings on doctors nationwide.

"Jeopardy" game show host Alex Trebek discovered in March 2019 that he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer, the same illness that struck Steve Jobs, Patrick Swayze and Ruth Bade Ginsburg, to name a few well know people. He has handled the situation with the heart of a hero, and it has been a grueling process. There has been tremendous pain, fatigue, sadness and disappointment after having short-lived evidence that the disease had gone into remission. He has been very public in his disclosures about his condition, and he's staring it down in the most unflinching manner.

DR. JORDAN WINTER brings his expertise to the subject of pancreatic cancer. He is the Chief of Surgical Oncology at University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio and he's the Director of Surgical Services at the Seidman Cancer Center. His clinical interest lies with the management of pancreatic and related cancers, and he has been a principal investigator on multiple clinical trials.

Marcia Cross has been exceptionally brave and remarkably forthcoming as she deals with anal cancer. This episode reveals the genesis of the disease and how it can be treated. The prognosis is considered, along with how it is managed over time.

DR. SAMANTHA HENDREN, a colorectal surgeon at Michigan Medicine and an Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery at the University of Michigan lends insight into how this illness is transmitted and what preventative options are available.

Grammy award-winning musician Peter Frampton has declared his 2019 51-city North American tour to be his final farewell to performing due to his diagnosis of Inclusion Body Myositis, an inflammatory muscle disease.

This episode considers how IBM presents itself and how it runs its course. It also examines why it targets certain body parts.

The guest who explores IBM in detail is Dr. Lisa Christopher-Stine, an associate professor of medicine and neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Director of the Johns Hopkins Myositis Center. She serves as one of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine College Advisors, and is a Board Member of the Johns Hopkins Institutional Review Board. She also serves as the Deputy Director of Telemedicine in the Division of Rheumatology.