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Benoit Bisson: Being a patient knows no boundaries

Guest blogger Benoit Bisson, a kidney cancer patient, journalist and SPM member in Montréal, offers an international perspective on the participatory medicine movement. He’s @Benoit_Bisson on Twitter; his blog is BenoitBisson.com. Guest post submissions are...

Health Care Hackers

A few weeks ago, with a combination of alarm and excitement, I realized that I would be presenting my research about rare-disease communities to a roomful, not just a row full, of actual rare-disease patients and caregivers. This was no academic exercise. It was as if...

Mama birds: Catherine Fairchild Calhoun and Laurie Strongin

On February 29, 2012, Rare Disease Day, I hosted a conversation with Catherine Fairchild Calhoun and Laurie Strongin, two people who have inspired me in my research about the social impact of the internet on health. They have also inspired me personally, finding joy...

Opening the Door to Closeted Science

NOTE: We’re happy to welcome back Sarah Greene, one of the founding members in 2009 of SPM and its journal. She left a while ago for London, where she’s continued her work at the leading edge of thought about medical knowledge.  Sarah is ahead of most of...

Most popular health *topics* of 2011?

To understand a headline – especially a year-end “Top N” list – you need to look under the hood and find their criteria. Yesterday the New York Times Well blog posted The Most Popular Health Topics of 2011. I looked, eagerly, to find the rise...

Steve Jobs’ Cancer Denial

The 60 minutes interview with Steve Jobs’ biographer is an intriguing piece that gives us a few insights into Steve Jobs and his battle with pancreatic cancer. But the most disturbing part of the interview for me was watching Walter Isaacson, a former editor of...

An out-of-office email – from a computer

This has nothing to do with healthcare, but it’s the most priceless example I’ve seen in a long time of Not Customer-Oriented Thinking, and perhaps Scary Workflow, both of which do apply to healthcare sometimes. As a Boston-based traveler, I have United...

What I learned at Health Foo

Just in case anyone is curious: my notes from Health Foo, a meeting held last weekend in Cambridge, MA. It’s long, so skim for the 9 lessons if you want a shortcut. What: Foo Camp is an unconference, constructed on the spot by the people who show up, with just a...

Bye Bye Google Health

Like so many attempts before it — drkoop.com and RevolutionHealth.com to name just two — Google has found that implementing personal health records in a meaningful way is really, really hard. So hard, in fact, that it has given up and is shuttering its...

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