e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
E-patients with Agency (or Attitude?)
What are the social and psychological factors that affect how someone is treated — or even their health outcomes? This question has popped up in my reading and in my […]
The Two Toms
Our dear friend, our brother, our hero, the inimitable Doc Tom, died on Good Friday 2006. Even though his untimely death came as a shock, Tom Ferguson had already far […]
