e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
New e-patient population estimate
The Pew Internet Project released the latest estimate for the e-patient population: 75% of internet users. Details on this and an upcoming survey follow… Please consider supporting the Society by joining us today! Thank you.
Interview: Mary Matthiesen, Conversations for Life
Mary Matthiesen, founder of Conversations for Life, has 17 years of front-line experience in healthcare, end of life care, and executive leadership. She's a transpersonal educator, coach, and community facilitator, raising awareness and promoting social change in...
Is ANYONE responsible for the whole patient?
The e-Patients Group has been discussing Shannon Brownlee's book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, which tells how the logic of the U.S. healthcare system works against coordination and effective treatment. "Between 20 and 30 cents on...
Medpedia – where are the patients??
Medpedia has gotten a lot of publicity in the past week. Considering that Wikipedia has disavowed* usefulness for patients, Medpedia sounds like a potentially great idea. * See Jon's correction in Comments. --EPD But when I saw their home page it literally took my...
Take control of your images!
Where to get DICOM readers
Update: links to free viewers for Windows, Mac, and Linux, for the DICOM image format used for scan imagesBackground information on DICOM, and the Wikipedia entryLinks to sample images, so you can experiment with a viewer Why I'm writing about this: Linux guru Doc...
An e-Patient Hero Leaves Us
Randy Pausch, teacher, speaker, e-patient, and father dies at 47.
Surprise! Students Find Inaccurate Health Information Online
A new study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) suggests that inaccurate medical information is easily found and regurgitated by students. But the topic the study chose to study — vaccines — has been under increasing scrutiny and controversy, limiting the generalizability of the results. Please consider supporting the Society by joining […]
Now THAT’s an e-participating patient
From ScienceRoll: “Jan Martens at Medblog.nl … mentioned Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald who should be considered one of the best examples of e-patients in the world. See why…” Hey Jen McCabe Gorman, what is it with the Dutch?
Can Professional Medical Societies Further the Ideals of Participatory Medicine?
Professional medical societies are not quite like the secret society Skull and Bones at Yale University, but they may well look that way to many patients. In most cases, their sole reason for being is to serve their members in a pretty narrowly defined way. The services generally include continuing medical education programs, an annual […]
Steal these slides
Click images to view full size originals. Last weekend I stumbled across the "attic" of Tom Ferguson MD, who was the "George Washington of patient empowerment," as CNN put it this month, citing his work since 1975 to create a world of freedom and power for patients....
Statistics, Genetics, and Playing the Lottery
I learned two important lessons in a statistics course I took in college: 1) don’t play the lottery; 2) be skeptical of statistics, especially nice-looking charts and graphs. Yes, I did grow up to be a major purveyor of statistics, but I think it’s a good thing that my first instinct is to be skeptical […]
Are on-line pharmacies a threat to participatory medicine?
In a piece in the New York Times 7/9/08 (Abuses are Found in Online Sales of Medication) a report (also out Weds) from Columbia University is described. According to the authors, 85% of online sites that sell medications directly to the public do not require a prescription or substitute an online questionnaire for one. This […]