by e-Patient Dave | Mar 20, 2017
Please cite this post as “by Dave deBronkart, Marilyn Mann and Peter Elias MD” or, on Twitter, “@ePatientDave, @MarilynMann & @PHEski.” Our blog software only allows listing one author but they provided 2/3 of the content. The medical news...
by e-Patient Dave | Jan 25, 2014
Here’s a new “must read” for people with a grim prognosis, submitted by Twitter friend @Scanman (Vijay Sadasivam), from the Tamil region of India: How Long Have I Got Left?, by Stanford neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi. Seven years ago that was my...
by e-Patient Dave | Dec 31, 2012
Some things are what they call “evergreen” – persistent value, never out of date. Two come together for this year-end post. __________ A lot’s changed since our society was formed in 2009, but year after year a core skill for participatory...
by Susannah Fox | Oct 5, 2012
(A cross-post from susannahfox.com) I had the great honor of being part of the first Medicine X conference at Stanford University last weekend. I presented a sneak preview of new survey results collected by the Pew Internet Project and the California HealthCare...
by Kathleen O'Malley | Dec 27, 2011
Why does this blog use the word “damn” so often? A search produces a whopping 38 hits, such as: Fools! Damn fools! And Medical Science (Right, Santa??) Atlantic: Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science “Gimme my damn data!” The stage is being set to enable...
by e-Patient Dave | Oct 5, 2011
We’ve often said here that when an e-patient wants to be responsible for treatment decisions, it’s essential to know how to evaluate the research about each option. A common mistake is to trust, blindly, news reports about a treatment, or even to trust,...
by Kathleen O'Malley | Sep 12, 2011
Guest blogger Tami Boehmer shares a recent conversation with e-Patient Dave about the pitfalls of survival statistics and the power of hope. Tami’s blog, “From Incurable to Incredible,” is at www.miraclesurvivors.com. I recently had the honor of...
by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | Jul 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....
by e-Patient Dave | Jun 23, 2011
e-Patients who want to collaborate with their physicians, and be responsible for their medical decisions, need to clearly understand what constitutes good evidence. It’s not always easy. Now Richard Smith, a 25 year editor of the British Medical Journal, has...
by Kathleen O'Malley | Jun 14, 2011
This guest post by SPM member Ellen Hoenig Carlson was inspired by a study on the prevalence of medical errors, published in the April issue of Health Affairs. Medical errors are one of the nation’s leading causes of death and injury. The famed 1999 Institute of...
by Jessie Gruman | Apr 22, 2011
Here’s an interesting (though oddly titled) post by Jon Richman: Lies, Damn Lies and Pharma Social Media Statistics. It is interesting because it beautifully un-packs misreporting on a topic of great interest to e-patients. It is oddly titled because while the...
by e-Patient Dave | Jan 29, 2011
We’ve recently been talking here about problems with poor study design in clinical trials. A health IT version of this problem raced through the newswires this week while I was on the road. The news coverage was particularly naïve, illustrating our point....
by e-Patient Dave | Jan 28, 2011
Update 1/29: in a comment, Gilles Frydman pointed out that Newsweek’s Sharon Begley wrote this article almost two months before the New Yorker piece appeared – and the editors held the article, apparently due to pressure from a pharma advertiser whose...
by e-Patient Dave | Jan 21, 2011
Update 1/22: this was originally in our “Found on the Net” sidebar, but it’s attracted enough comments that it belongs in the mainstream. I was researching the coverage of statins on Health News Review, the great e-patient resource we’ve often...
by e-Patient Dave | Jan 13, 2011
A recurring theme on this blog is the need for empowered, engaged patients to understand what they read about science. It’s true when researching treatments for one’s condition, it’s true when considering government policy proposals, it’s true...
by e-Patient Dave | Dec 29, 2010
Kent Bottles MD is one of the best healthcare thinkers I’ve met. Yesterday he completed a two-part tour de force on The Health Care blog titled “The Difficult Science.” Here are part 1 and part 2. This is about “how do we know what we think we...
by e-Patient Dave | Dec 20, 2010
Headline and body edited Oct 6, 2013: the original post talked about “practice variation,” but that was bad wording. The problem is unwarranted practice variation: variation that, when studied, is not warranted by actual differences between cases....
by e-Patient Dave | Dec 12, 2010
All, if you have a story where you were affected by being involved (or not) in a medical decision, please see my request at “Help Me Represent You” below. Same if you have points you want me to bring to this seminar’s attention. I feel extremely fortunate...
by Peter Frishauf | Oct 20, 2010
A new commentary on “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science,” in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly. [See also our previous post on the article, with dozens of comments, some of them excellent. And be sure to read Peter’s footnotes. -e-Patient Dave]...
by e-Patient Dave | Oct 17, 2010
There’s an extraordinary new article in The Atlantic, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science.” It echos the excellent article in our Journal of Participatory Medicine (JoPM) one year ago this week, by Richard W. Smith, 25 year editor of the British...
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