Wanted for a clinical trial: Women who can urinate while lying on their backs

I’ve brought you news of a woman giving birth in an MRI for science, which followed a description of an orgasm in an MRI and a couple having sex in such a device. (These studies, it should be noted, all involved different people.) Today I bring you the story of researchers who filled an obvious void in this research: A study of women peeing while in an MRI.

The study, “A Preliminary Report on the Use of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging with Simultaneous Urodynamics to Record Brain Activity During Micturition,” was published last week in the Journal of Urology. Micturition, as you probably guessed, is a synonym for urination. What caught my eye was this, from the abstract:

What’s a previvor? Cancer advocacy group that coined term objects to how I used it at TEDMED

When I posted my TEDMED talk last week, one of the terms I highlighted from it was “previvor.”  Here is how I described that term in my talk:

Previvor is what a particular cancer advocacy group would like everyone who just has a risk factor but hasn’t actually had that cancer to call themselves.

Yesterday, I received a letter from Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered (FORCE), the advocacy group that coined the term, expressing concerns about how I had used it. (I’ve made the whole letter available here.) FORCE wrote that they intend previvor to describe people with “a very high risk for a deadly disease like cancer.” And in a different version of the letter that they posted online, executive director Sue Friedman wrote:

Pre-games, previvors, and pre-death: My TEDMED talk on what medicine can learn from Moneyball

That’s me with one of my favorite artists, Jill Sobule — and her mom! — backstage at TEDMED (courtesy TEDMED)

In April, I was given the chance to speak at TEDMED 2012, a remarkable gathering of health care leaders, patients, and entertainers, among others, in Washington, DC. It was, as my friend Scott Hensley of NPR put it:

…a way for people who care a lot about health care to get together and make some headway on thorny problems.

In other words:

The smart kids from the cafeteria have grown up and become cool, a geeky kind of cool.

In short, it was a non-stop smorgasbord of ideas, inside and outside of the Kennedy Center auditorium.

TEDMED has just posted the video of my talk, which you can watch below (post continues afterward):