Search all of the Society for Participatory Medicine website:Search

Electronic Medical Records? Yeah, Not So Much

So with all this talk about healthcare technologies and the new budget and Health 2.0, you’d think that electronic medical records (EMRs) were on the rise. Perhaps they are, but as the Associated Press reports, fewer than 2 percent of providers have completely...

If you have been the victim of clinical harm…

… or involved in an incident, as patient or provider, Paul Levy solicits your submission. He’s hosting the medical blogosphere’s Grand Rounds next Tuesday, and has chosen the topic When Things Go Awry. Details and instructions are here....

Dr. Reuben deeply regrets that this happened!

This is the third post in the unfortunate series about conflicts of interest. You must be kiddin’! That’s all Scott Reuben, MD, the doctor Scientific American calls “a medical Madoff”, had to say after putting the last two handful of nails into...

I Am “A Nobody & A Nothing” & I’m Proud Of It!

In our continuous series about undeclared conflicts of interest comes a great blog post from the Wall Street Journal. In it JAMA’s editor in chief, Catherine DeAngelis, M.D, interviewed about a certain Jonathan Leo, had these choice words to describe him:...

Opaque, Inc.

Cross-posted from my own blog. Truth be told, at present, the activities of “La Cosa Nostra” are more transparent that what goes on in the health care system. The only certainty I have, as an individual trying to figure out what is not wrong with the...

Crowdsourced Healthcare Reform: The First Round

Cross-posted from my own blog. During 2 weeks in December 2008, over 9,000 Americans in all 50 states and the District of Columbia registered to host a health care community group to discuss healthcare reform. Thousands more participated in these gatherings. They all...

I’m putting my data in Google and HealthVault

Cross-posted from my own blog a week ago. I’ve decided to go ahead and put my data in Google Health and MicroSoft HealthVault. (Note: MicroSoft HealthVault is a different kind of thing from Google Health. About the only thing they have in common is that I...

Rare Disease Day 2009

Today is Rare Disease Day 2009. Join us in recognizing the reality of rare disorders and celebrating the beauty in the eyes of children living with rare disease and those who have lost their lives.  

Medpedia: Who gets to say what info is reliable?

Unless you’ve been offline since Wednesday, you know that Medpedia has gone into public beta. I have a concern about the reliability of their model, based on my personal experience and the self-education I’ve been doing for the past year. I want to lay out...

The Wellsphere Blogging Controversy

You may have heard of the Wellsphere blogging controversy (if not, here’s one take on the issue, and here’s another from a different perspective). In a nutshell, Wellsphere went to bloggers in the health world and asked them if they could syndicate their...

Saving Lives, Old-School Style

What if there was a simple, old-school style procedure that could save tens of thousands of lives every year? Better yet, what if it could be implemented at minuscule costs (about $3 million to rollout nationwide), and would require very little change in...

A Fatally Flawed Medical Educational Model

This week, many news outlets reported on how residents should be given 5 hours of sleep after working 16 hours straight. Think about that for a moment. In what other job — any job in the world — would it be acceptable to even use the term “after...

Florence Nightingale, passionate statistician

A tip of the twitter-hat to @TimOReilly for this, from Science News: When Florence Nightingale arrived at a British hospital in Turkey during the Crimean War, she found a nightmare of misery and chaos. Men lay crowded next to each other in endless corridors. The air...

Donate