John M. Grohol, Psy.D., Author at SPM Blog

Warmly Remembering Tom Ferguson & His Legacy #DocTom10

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | Apr 15, 2016

Next in our #DocTom10 series, which started here. I first met Tom Ferguson in 1994 online (where else?) when he reached out via email to chat about online support groups. I was still in graduate school at the time, and he had come across my indexes of Internet...

PHI Data Breaches May be Increasing, But It’s Not Impacting Our Sharing

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | Apr 15, 2015

According to a new study in JAMA, data breaches into people’s protected health information (PHI) records are increasing: “[The] study that found almost 30 million health records nationwide were involved in criminal theft, malicious hacking or other data...

How WebMD May Unfairly Influence Your Health Choices — Through Search

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | Dec 19, 2013

Go ahead and type in virtually any health or mental health condition into Google. Heck, even try a popular medication or two. Time and time again, you’ll notice a reliable trend — 2 or 3 of the top 10 search results are nearly always going to be WebMD. But...

Screw HIPAA: Here’s a Look at My Doctor’s Office

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | Aug 27, 2013

A few months ago, I complained about the layout of one of my doctor’s offices. There’s a rough layout drawing of the office waiting area to the side there. I’m standing just in front of the number 1, while people are sitting along the wall behind me....

The Black Box of You: Why the Quantified Self is so Frustrating Today

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | Apr 22, 2013

Imagine a black box. You can feed all sorts of information and data into it all the live long day. But the amount of data you can get out of it is limited. It just stares back at you with its blank, neutral sides. It can tell you things like where it was manufactured,...