John M. Grohol, Psy.D. |

Warmly Remembering Tom Ferguson & His Legacy #DocTom10

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | April 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. | April 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. | December 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. | August 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. | April 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,...

The Government’s Assault on Women’s Health

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | March 17, 2012

I’m a little confused… I’m not sure where the U.S. Constitution guaranteed the government’s right to interfere with the doctor/patient relationship. Nowhere in this historic document could I find anything about the government’s right to...

Steve Jobs’ Cancer Denial

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | October 23, 2011

The 60 minutes interview with Steve Jobs’ biographer is an intriguing piece that gives us a few insights into Steve Jobs and his battle with pancreatic cancer. But the most disturbing part of the interview for me was watching Walter Isaacson, a former editor of...

Invitation to Connected Health Attendees, 2011

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | October 16, 2011

Please join us for the 2nd Annual Society for Participatory Medicine Cocktail Reception, taking place on Thursday, October 20, 2011 at the Liberty Hotel in Boston (http://www.libertyhotel.com/) from 6:00 – 8:00 pm. If you’re attending the Connected Health...

Why Sometimes Health Reporting Should be Done By Journalists

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | July 24, 2011

I’m all for citizen journalism, and can even stand the content mills like LiveStrong, who have pimped out their name and brand in order to make a quick buck. But I draw the line with bad reporting and worse, biased representation of the data to prove a point....

First Diagnosing Mole iPhone app

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | July 7, 2011

Well, it was bound to happen. Skin Scan is a new iPhone app that purports to analyze your moles for evidence of malignancy — all in the application itself through its own proprietary algorithms. Just take a few photos over time, and it will analyze their...