e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
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...
Engage With Grace
The following post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace Team. Here's an image of the slide, and below is the post that many are sharing today. (The original PowerPoint slide is linked within the post.) Please see comments at end. We make choices...
Reducing Disparities, Spreading Improvement
Josh Seidman asks a very good question that goes toward our discussion of spreading improvement and the digital divide, "If [targeted] interventions... have been shown to have an enormous impact on the health of these populations, maybe Ix and related initiatives can...
Illness in the Age of ‘e’: A case study in participatory medicine
Last month, the Connected Health Symposium at Harvard Medical School saw a first: a full-length case study in participatory medicine, described concurrently by both the patient and his physician. The physician was our own Danny Sands MD, and the patient was our...
No *other* conflict of interest, huh?
What's wrong with this picture? While continuing to search for information regarding the collective statistical illiteracy issue covered a couple of days ago, I found a brand new article in the New England Journal of Medicine. As an exercise I decided to reorganize...
Lies, Damn Lies And Statistics: Collective Statistical Illiteracy
Everyone knows the supposed origin of the phrase. But as you can see here it goes back to Medicine: "Look at the dozens of operations by me this year without a death," says the operator. His less enthusiastic neighbor thinks of the proverbial kinds of falsehoods,...
