e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Personalized Medicine, the Next Frontier
Nancy B. Finn is a journalist with an expertise in the implementation of digital communications in health care. This is her second guest post on e-patients.net: When an individual patient visits his or her doctor with a problem, traditional clinical diagnosis is made...
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 anyone's...
Virtual Participatory Medicine Town Meeting
On Friday Senator Tom Daschle announced a campaign to get input from the public about what healthcare reform should look like. "The Transition will host Health Care Community Discussions across the Country over the holidays this December to help his Policy Team put...
Internet diagnoses: Trust them or toss them?
This guest post is an article written by Lisa Neal Gualtieri, published in her local paper. It's an example of widening distribution of principles and practices documented in the e-patient white paper. I'm grateful to Lisa for sharing these true stories of patients...
New Health Journalism Blog
The Association of Health Care Journalists has launched a new blog called Covering Health and it's well worth adding to your blogroll.
How We Die
This is what I know about death. Admitted to a nursing home with a broken hip-dehydration, my ninety-eight-year-old grandmother awoke from a deep slumber, laughing and clapping her hands when my five-year-old daughter played the violin. A week later she had a stroke...
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 working 16 hours."...
“The 100 Percent Organic Man”
Dr. Alan Greene has been on a mission to find out all he can about organic food.  You can read all about his three year journey as "The 100 Percent Organic Man" on the New York Times article and Blog post by Tara Parker-Pope. He just ended a year as the President of...
Cyberchondria: Old Wine in New Bottles
Just before Thanksgiving, Microsoft released a study entitled, "Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search." Ryen White and Eric Horvitz took advantage of a data set that few people have access to (log files from Microsoft's Live Search...
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...
“I can buy a damn good amputation…”
Paul Grundy MD, of IBM, chair of PCPCC, is interviewed in the current Crain's Benefits Outlook, a business publication about employee benefit programs. This quote alone is worth the price of admission: I can buy a damn good amputation for my diabetic, but what I can’t...
“The Evidence Gap”: Pharma impedes patient access to better treatment
A lot of effort and study is going into improving healthcare and untangling its cost structure. So methinks it's nearly criminal when someone blocks adoption of a treatment that's better, especially when it's also less expensive. Case in point, from yesterday's NY...