Nearly 500,000 military personnel died during the U.S. Civil War. That’s almost half of all Americans who have ever died during wartime, and more than a hundred times more than died during the American Revolution. This Memorial day, we decided to take a close look at the number of American servicemembers who lost their lives during wartime in an effort to put their sacrifices into a broader perspective.

  Full report here. Cold Sweat begins June 12th at Atwater Village Theatre  Buy tickets here!

“He (Stanford medical ethicist David Magnus) and others say this kind of situation is a symptom of a much bigger problem: Doctors are just plain bad at communicating about death.”

“Across the board with end-of-life care clinical interactions, they’re full of misunderstandings,” he says.  See NPR story here.

Hope Arnold and her husband J.D. Falk faced J.D.’s terminal stomach cancer for ten months before finding a doctor willing to use straight talk with them.

In this video, it’s as if someone took those words to heart.  Cancer patients were given surprise, over-the-top makeovers, and their reactions were photographed.

You may need Kleenex.

“Cold Sweat” is a challenging, wry, and topical play that explores issues of grief, mortality, and the end-of-life in a fresh and engaging manner as it pitches our modern scientific skepticism against its eternal nemesis — faith.

Inspired in part by the life of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, “Cold Sweat” finds humor in the unlikeliest places – a battlefield surgical unit, a hospital morgue, a freshly dug grave.

Written by Obie-Award winning playwright, Neal Bell, this production is the Los Angeles premiere of “Cold Sweat.”

We appreciate your donations to Cold Sweat! Please support us at this link!

The report found that just 45 percent of Medicare patients who’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s said they were informed of the diagnosis by their doctor. By contrast, more than 90 percent of Medicare patients with cancer said they were told by their doctor.

“What we found is really shocking,” says Beth Kallmyer, vice president of constituent services for the Alzheimer’s Association. “This is reminiscent of what happened in the 1960s and 1970s with cancer,” she says. “But that’s changed now, and it really needs to change for Alzheimer’s as well.”

Everything old is new again.

Please support our production of Neal Bell’s Cold Sweat with a donation.