e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
How Doctors Die
If you're interested in a responsible approach to one's own death, you'll want to read How Doctors Die, on the Zocalo Public Square blog. It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them...
@AfternoonNapper on two Stanford medicine blogs
New SPM member @AfternoonNapper Sarah Kucharski was just featured on the Stanford School of Medicine blog, for a conversation she had on their Medicine X blog (emerging technologies) about how web-savvy patients are changing what's acceptable in medicine. Well done!
Once again: e-patient essential – sorting out what writings to trust
A prime benefit of individual membership ($30) in our Society for Participatory Medicine is the right to participate in our members-only listserv. It was pretty sleepy a year ago, but these days it's a hotbed of juicy discussions. Here's something that arose Thursday....
World AIDS Day
Mark Senak's post, "World AIDS Day: The Past Cannot Be the Future," inspired me to write an epic comment about different perspectives on illness and care delivery, so I adapted and expanded it to share here: I recently read Susan Sontag's two essays, "Illness as...
Health News Review gets its second makeover. With comments!
We've often cited Gary Schwitzer's Health News Review (@HealthNewsRevu on Twitter) as an invaluable e-patient resource. With a structured ten point evaluation process, the site's many trained reviewers evaluate the reporting of health news. We reported on their first...
Alert: Lawrence Weed, father of the Problem Oriented Medical Record, looks ahead
The excellent ICMCC daily newsletter just alerted me to this item from Permanente Journal: Interview with Lawrence Weed, MD -- The Father of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record Looks Ahead. I hope to absorb it in the next day or two, and I invite people who know this...
In memoriam: Monique Doyle Spencer
Cross-posted from my own site. Last night a dear and inspiring friend breathed her last. Monique Doyle Spencer, metastatic breast cancer patient, died at home as she wished. All knew the end was near. A couple of weeks ago she happily attended her daughter's wedding;...
EHR data spurs real-time evidence-based medicine (NEJM / Health IT Exchange)
Wow. Todd Park, Chief Technical Officer at HHS, ought to be jumping out of his skin with joy at this one. This time, House, M.D. fans, it was lupus. The article “Evidence-Based Medicine in the EMR Era” published in the Nov. 10 issue of the New England Journal of...
This year it’s … Occupy With Grace
As in 2009 and 2010, this year too we donate our top post at Thanksgiving to the Engage With Grace movement, encouraging people to participate in this very important discussion, at the time of year when we're most likely to be together with families. Because it is,...
Kenneth S. Spriggs: The Benefits Of Visualizing Your Medical Data
Guest blogger Ken Spriggs talks about how he made sense of his medical data by creating a graphic electronic health record, the DIYEHR. [Update 11/25: the data visualization that Ken created is so extraordinary that we're adding it here, four days after the original...
Worst Headache of My Life Becomes Lesson About Role of Story in Health
This post and 5 minute video were published on ABC News yesterday and I want to share them with this community as well. Three months ago, at the age of 40, I had a small bleed in my brain. My story is no more special than any of your stories, but I learned something...
Elaine Schattner: Don Berwick, Head of CMS, on the Value of Patient-Centered Care
Usually we talk about participatory medicine at the level of the individual care relationship, but increasingly we're seeing the need to “Design and create a safe, decent, patient centered healthcare system.” And as we start to get real about that - concrete, tangible...