OF BOMBSHELLS AND HUCKSTERS
Your June 30 edition highlights the proliferation of medical entrepreneurship in our healthcare system. Your cover article ("Let's get physical") profiles the blonde bombshell recently employed by a (no doubt private) prestigious Toronto clinic. Dr Melissa Hershberg tells the rest of us dummies that, with our 2,000+ patient practices, we could be earning an additional $100,000 annually by using EMR — with a small contribution to the developer.

Later, we hear about the Khan practice of preying on cancer patients ("Clinic prescribes untested cancer 'cure'") by promoting an, as yet, unproven cancer therapy for the paltry sum of $150 per week.

Both smell of the rape of the patient. Such behaviour was previously associated with south of the border capitalist medicine or the fringe/complementary type of healthcare. How sad that it is now entering the mainstream. Is our selection system of future medical practitioners so deficient that we will see a proliferation of  these pariahs in the future?

I hope not.  But the crucial point is, does profiling these "entrepreneurs" in a national journal encourage such unprofessional behaviour?

Dr Seamus Donaghy, Grimsby, ON

DULL PENCILS
In the News in Brief section of the August 30 issue, you report on the "Fifty-year old pencil removed from woman's brain." The caption under the radiographic image reads "MRI of pencil." This is in fact a CT scan. Unlike MRIs, which use strong magnets to measure the magnetic resonance of tissues, CT scans use x-rays to look at tissue (and in this case, pencil) density. Just a point of clarification. Sharpening our pencils, so to speak.

D'Arcy Little, MD, CCFP, PGY-4 Resident in Diagnostic Imaging, Toronto, ON