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Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts

Monday, August 8, 2022

What is health journalism?

According to wikipedia that there are not many courses or career paths specifically on medical journalism, but it is hard to imagine that this field is not going to expand in future.

Recently the McMaster Daily News  reported on a YouTube channel called ViolinMD created by Dr. Siobhan Deshauer. She was a fifth year medical resident (recently finished residency successfully) but has been vlogging about her experience quite frequently since she started residency. She was a graduate of the Michael G. DeGroote school of medicine, which is why you can get a BA in music (violin) and still get into a medical school like McMaster. In one of the episodes she mentions "medical journalism" as she did a stint doing such for ABC news as a consultant on their medical news team. I can't recall that specific episode  - because I have watched so many of them -  but we can imagine that one of the reasons she got that consultancy work was because of her creative media skills vlogging her real lived experience on the front lines.

In Canada one of the most famous medical journalists might be Andre Picard, health columnist for the Globe and Mail. His recent book "Neglected No More:The Urgent Need to Improve the Lives of Canada's Elders in the Wake of a Pandemic", shed a lot of light on the state of long term care in the Canadian system.

There is a health column in the New York times called "Diagnosis" written by Lisa Sanders MD, who used write scripts for the TV Series House. I watched the TV documentary version of it about solving rare medical mysteries, like it is detective work.  Of course there are the likes of Sanjay Gupta, Chief Medical Correspondent for CNN, etc.

There are also investigative journalism books that really delve into medical issues. Michael Pollan wrote "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence" which is a master study of psychedelics research. The book by author  James Nestor called "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art" is a pioneering investigation into the new research and evidence on human breathing and the effect on our overall health. It is fascinating to see how these science minded though "non-health practitioners" explore these fields so relevant to medical well being.  There are many more books by journalists that explore medical and health issues. 

An area tangential to all this are the scientists who study the reporting of health information in various media looking for evidence of factual inaccuracy, let alone stories that create false hope or deceive the public. Timothy Caulfield is famous for debunking the myths and misconceptions, and the McMaster Health Forum has an evidence based health research group focusing on policy decision making for various health topics of concern.

Friday, June 24, 2016

Blip culture, eHealth, and Tibetan Medicine

Another "Pastism" and Alvin Toffler "Futurism" post. The theme seems to be again about the early days of the internet, with only a smattering of relevance to ehealth.

I don't know what it is like now in Nepal but in 1996 in Boudhanath, the enclave of Kathmandu where there is a large population of Tibetan refugees living, using the internet was limited to one of only a dozen or so internet cafes in the entire city of Kathmandu, let alone Boudanath.  The internet cafe was mostly a place to make a long distance telephone call or send a fax. Not many in my immediate family even used email then. Anyway, I wanted to find out how my father was doing following his prostate surgery.  To digress, what was I doing in Boudhanath in the first place?

First off, I had just finished a one year career college diploma in Visual Basic/C Language Programming but instead of looking for a job like I was supposed to, I gave in to the notion to go to Nepal. I was a little disappointed that I had not studied HTML, Java script, and & Web Design because at that time, there was something called the "Internet' developing and I was a sort of a pioneer in that area because I had run a Bulletin Board System (BBS) system and I lived in Silicon Valley North (Ottawa). I guess the allure of the Himalayas had just too powerful a hold over me. The career college I graduated from would later change it's name to Everest College.Why equate getting a job and climbing the highest mountain in the world, I will never know.


I had gone to Nepal with the idea of studying about traditional Tibetan medicine and how ignorant westerners like me could be schooled to learn about it. A few years before I had had an appointment and a health check up with Yeshe Donden in Dharmasala India, the Himalayan town which holds the residence of the Dalai Lama and a large Tibetan refugee population. Yeshe Donden was once the personal physician of the Dalai Lama. Of course, I heeded some of his advise to improve my health, and bought his book "Health Through Balance" when I returned to Canada. I also possessed at the time more than several "medicine buddha initiations from my Tibetan Lama and other Lamas as well.  It was a meditation practice that somehow always had deeply resonated within me and I valued the "mantra as medicine" ideal.

I support Tibetan refugees and human rights and at that time two Tibetans and their families who I had known and corresponded with for many years were both living in Boudhanath. It was a good opportunity for me to travel there then. One of the Tibetans was actually a trained physician from Tibet, but in modern Chinese medical science, not traditional Tibetan medicine. Apparently, he almost had no choice but to study medicine under the Communist education system. Now as a refugee in Nepal, he was more keenly interested in following his natural bent, which was studying Tibetan Buddhist meditation practices.  Through his connections I was able to meet a number of Tibetan physicians, one of whom was Amchi (Doctor in Tibetan)   to the King of the Royal Family of Nepal.  Alas, this was a few years before the bad seed in that royal family took an automatic weapon and annihilated a dozen of the lot, including himself. That left a distant uncle  or relative of the royals to try to take up the vacant throne.

Another Tibetan physician who wore the robes of a monk (some do not) was a keeper and supplier of bags of herbal medicines, all hand picked in the Himalayas.  The bags were larger than 25 kilogram rice bags stacked up from floor to ceiling. From my experience living in South Korea doctors there could speak reasonable English because they had studied western medicine textbooks in English. These Tibetan physicians I was with had no such English language skills, and this was another reason for my being there - teaching English.

Anyway, once it was learned that my father had just gone through surgery for prostate cancer I was informed that traditional Tibetan medicine for him would be very good. Next thing I knew I had a bag of pills to take back home with me. When I got back home and visited my father in the hospital he was still listening to the Qi Gong meditation tape I had given him. I don't think he ever took the Tibetan medicine, but the pills were all nicely wrapped in gold leaf and looked good.  I had  previously heard about PADMA 28, Tibetan medicine for the heart, but had no idea about all the "precious pills" the Men-Tsee-Khang had in their stores for other illnesses and conditions. 

So this is all just to say that medical systems like those in Tibet are ancient - comprising thousands of years of evolution and development - while eHealth systems in comparison are a "blip culture", a phrase coined by Alvin Toffler. If you click that link you will find an interesting chapter (by the same name)  in a book called Evidence-Based Health Communication".

One spin off of the ancient meditation cultures like Tibet for eHealth has been a proliferation of apps  for mindfulness meditation.  I think this an amazing development, in line with computer brain interfaces, EEG mindfulness feedback systems, virtual reality temple visits, and whatever else you can think of from the touch of a button. The cultural anthropologist in me still thinks an app is not real communication, but since I successfully completed an online 8 week course on mindfulness meditation, I am not one to talk. I thought the course was brilliant and I have done the real 10 day silent mindfulness meditation retreats.  I blogged about that < here >.









Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Health Informatics Books on the HIMSS website

Heard about John Halamka's book Life as a Healthcare CIO which you can purchase off the HIMSS bookstore webpage. Browsing through all the other book offerings on HIMSS one need not go any further to procure an education on Health Informatics. 

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Health Coach - York University Program

I was at an National Institute for Health Informatics (NIHI) conference at York University when I heard about York's Health Coach program. From my relatively short time studying and being involved with Health Informatics, I really think this program will have relevance in the future. Here is part of the description I thought most interesting:

"York's commitment to health coaching is related to the increasing capacity of 21st century technologies to eliminate the need for office consultation. Many tests that are presently implemented or planned during medical office consultations will be planned by phone and undertaken at home as primary care and specialist physicians increasingly use remote monitoring to precisely assess patient status. As this trend develops, patients and caregivers will become increasingly motivated to improve behavioural effects on health. The health coach will be the first line of contact in stimulating and supporting health-behaviour change, acting in alignment with treating physicians. This improves the scope of services being delivered and lowers delivery costs by leveraging cost effective people."

It does sound to me in-line with Dr. Eric Topols' "creative deconstruction of medicine", but I haven't read the book yet, and have no idea if he mentions this type of role. Dr. Topol will be a keynote speaker at the eHealth conference in Ottawa this spring. Certainly, from the research I have seen on personal health records, there is room and a need for Health Coaches.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Interfaith Dialogue on Avatar Immortality

The Avatar project created by Russian Billionaire Dmitry Itskov has a remarkable website, including this Interfaith Dialogue on the spiritual future of humanity as it approaches the technological ability to:

  1. A robotic copy of a human body remotely controlled by BCI - 2015 - 2020
  2. An Avatar in which a human brain is transplanted at the end of one's life - 2020 - 2025
  3. An Avatar with an artificial brain in which a human personality is transplanted at the end of one's life - 2030 - 2035
  4. A hologram like avatar - 2040 - 2045
There is a lot of heavy weight endorsement for this project if you look at the list of names in their letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon . There are a lot more names from the religious traditions on that letter as well, than are included in this video of interfaith dialogue. One of the names I had to look up was Dr. James Martin — "British author and entrepreneur and the largest individual benefactor to the University of Oxford in its 900-year history". I probably should have heard of him, A) because I have worked with computer information technology for 30 years, and B) because I work in a university where large donations by benefactors is the essential component for driving research and keeping university infrastructure and education alive.  I read the biography of Dr. William Osler several times, the masterful version written by Michael Bliss. When Osler was enticed to go to Johns Hopkins, one of the first hospitals combined with a teaching university level medical school, it was just an architectural blue print at the time. But it owed it's existence to visionary philanthropic benefactors and it was a turning point in philanthropic largesse. Millionaires were starting to seek immortality for their names by given money to universities instead of churches, except for eccentrics like Carnegie, who thought building free libraries and educating the massess was more worthy of the life energy contained in his horde of lucre.  It now seems like giving money to immortality projects is the ultimate form of philanthropic immortality. 

Sunday, March 17, 2013

The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays


This was from the mailing list of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology. Quite a frightening list of chapter titles when I first read it. The future will be stranger than we think, but now that I think about it, maybe the future will just be normal, because it seems to be kind of normal now. Isn't that strange?: http://ieet.org/


NEW BOOKS BY IEETers
http://www.ieet.org/images/uploads/Screen-Shot-2013-03-05-at-9.48.10-AM.png
The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays  (2013)
by eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More
Table of Contents
Part I Roots and Core Themes
1 The Philosophy of Transhumanism, Max More
2 Aesthetics: Bringing the Arts & Design into the Discussion of Transhumanism, Natasha Vita-More*
3 Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up, Nick Bostrom*
4 Transhumanist Declaration (2012), Various
5 Morphological Freedom – Why We Not Just Want It, but Need It, Anders Sandberg
Part II Human Enhancement: The Somatic Sphere
6 Welcome to the Future of Medicine, Robert A. Freitas Jr.
7 Life Expansion Media, Natasha Vita-More*
8 The Hybronaut Affair: A Ménage of Art, Technology, and Science, Laura Beloff
9 Transavatars, William Sims Bainbridge*
10 Alternative Biologies, Rachel Armstrong
Part III Human Enhancement: The Cognitive Sphere
11 Re-Inventing Ourselves: The Plasticity of Embodiment, Sensing, and Mind, Andy Clark
12 Artificial General Intelligence and the Future of Humanity, Ben Goertzel*
13 Intelligent Information Filters and Enhanced Reality, Alexander “Sasha” Chislenko
14 Uploading to Substrate-Independent Minds, Randal A. Koene
15 Uploading, Ralph C. Merkle
Part IV Core Technologies
16 Why Freud Was the First Good AI Theorist, Marvin Minsky
17 Pigs in Cyberspace, Hans Moravec
18 Nanocomputers, J. Storrs Hall
19 Immortalist Fictions and Strategies, Michael R. Rose
20 Dialogue between Ray Kurzweil and Eric Drexler
Part V Engines of Life: Identity and Beyond Death
21 The Curate’s Egg of Anti-Anti-Aging Bioethics, Aubrey de Grey*
22 Medical Time Travel, Brian Wowk
23 Transhumanism and Personal Identity,James Hughes*
24 Transcendent Engineering, Giulio Prisco*
Part VI Enhanced Decision-Making
25 Idea Futures: Encouraging an Honest Consensus, Robin Hanson
26 The Proactionary Principle: Optimizing Technological Outcomes, Max More
27 The Open Society and Its Media, Mark S. Miller, with E. Dean Tribble, Ravi Pandya, and Marc Stiegler
Part VII Biopolitics and Policy
28 Performance Enhancement and Legal Theory: An Interview with Professor Michael H. Shapiro
29 Justifying Human Enhancement: The Accumulation of Biocultural Capital, Andy Miah*
30 The Battle for the Future, Gregory Stock
31 Mind is Deeper Than Matter: Transgenderism, Transhumanism, and the Freedom of Form, Martine Rothblatt*
32 For Enhancing People, Ronald Bailey
33 Is Enhancement Worthy of Being a Right?,Patrick D. Hopkins*
34 Freedom by Design: Transhumanist Values and Cognitive Liberty, Wrye Sententia*
Part VIII Future Trajectories: Singularity
35 Technological Singularity, Vernor Vinge
36 An Overview of Models of Technological Singularity, Anders Sandberg
37 A Critical Discussion of Vinge’s Singularity Concept, David Brin*, Damien Broderick, Nick Bostrom, Alexander “Sasha” Chislenko, Robin Hanson, Max More, Michael Nielsen, and Anders Sandberg
Part IX The World’s Most Dangerous Idea
38 The Great Transition: Ideas and Anxieties,Russell Blackford*
39 Trans and Post, Damien Broderick
40 Back to Nature II: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century, Roy Ascott
41 A Letter to Mother Nature, Max More
42 Progress and Relinquishment, Ray Kurzweil
*IEET Fellow, Scholar or Staff

Sunday, March 3, 2013

HeLa High School will Teach Health Informatics

HeLa High School, opening in the Fall 2013 in Vancouver, Washington State USA is astonishing in a number of different ways:

  • It has Health Informatics as major concentration in the curriculum
  • It makes the term "pre-med" even more pre-med
  • It honours naming the school after Henrietta Lacks, stem cell medical research participant  who's cancerous tumours became the HeLa stem cell line
  • It follows maybe the Swiss education model which is based more on apprenticeship and job training models?
I've read the book by Rebecca Skloot about the life of Henrietta Lacks, and it is highly recommended. Quite appropriate for ethical reasons to name a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) school for her. Well they named it for the stem cells too. I know some Canadian university Health Science undergrad programs have a reputation being thought of as "pre-med", but this is even more competitive. How are students chosen for admission? If students are studying Health Informatics that early, what will that do the applied M.Sc. in Health Informatics in the future? 

New Vancouver high school will focus on health, bioscience

Evergreen Public Schools' HeLa High will open in fall

The view from a west-facing window inside the media center of the new Henrietta Lacks Health and Bioscience High School, which opens in the fall.
The view from a west-facing window inside the media center of the new Henrietta Lacks Health and Bioscience High School, which opens in the fall.


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Evergreen Public Schools Director of Facilities Susan Steinbrenner, left, and Public Information Specialist Kathryn Garcia-Stackpole tour the new Henrietta Lacks Health and Bioscience High School, the only such school in the state.
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Henrietta Lacks' cancerous cells were harvested without her knowledge and cultured for medical research to create an immortal cell line. Her story was told in the nonfiction book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Portland author Rebecca Skloot. HeLa High is the first school building in the nation to be named for her.
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Evergreen Public Schools spokeswoman Carol Fenstermacher stands inside the school's simulated hospital nursing station, where students will get hands-on, real-world experience on their way to pursuing careers in health care.
MAP
Map data ©2013 Google - Terms of Use

Map
Hybrid

HeLa High School

9105 N.E. Ninth St., Vancouver
• School opens: Fall 2013. •Total estimated construction cost:
$23.7 million.
• Maximum number of students: 500.
• Size: 60,000 square feet.
• Curriculum focus: A biosciences and health care curriculum that includes extensive partnerships with Peacehealth Southwest Medical Center and others to provide opportunities for hands-on learning.

Programs of study

• Nursing and patient services.
• Health informatics.
• Biotechnology.
• Biomedical engineering.
• Pharmacy.
The pharmacy is nearly ready. The state-of-the-art nursing station is down the hall. But this isn't a hospital. It's Vancouver's newest high school.
Henrietta Lacks Health and Bioscience High School — HeLa High for short — is such a rare model that a very small number of similar schools exist nationwide. When its doors open in September, students will experience hands-on learning with state-of-the-art technology and partnership opportunities with PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center, just a block away.
"The state has a number of schools focused on STEM — science, technology, engineering and math, " said Julie Tumelty, the school's principal. "But we haven't heard about another school in Washington that is specifically focused on health and bioscience."
As baby boomers age, studies point to an increasing need for well-trained health care workers. An Evergreen Public Schools study indicated about 20 percent of its ninth-graders planned to pursue a career in health care. It seemed an opportune time to pursue the specialty school. PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center has worked with the school district for almost a decade to help plan the school. The medical center benefits by helping funnel more local students into health care fields.

How HeLa is funded

In 2002, Evergreen Public Schools received a $200,000 federal Workforce Investment Act grant to investigate how to develop employees to meet the growing demand for the health care industry. That led to the decision to build a heath-focused high school.
The total estimated construction cost is $23.7 million. To help with construction, the district received a $17.4 million Qualified School Construction Bond, federal stimulus money that is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The remaining money comes from a $1 million grant from the Washington State Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development (CTED), proceeds from the district's previous land sales and state matching money.
The fast-growing district qualified for matching money because it has more than 1,200 high school students taking classes in portables. Moving about 500 of the district's high school students to the new school will ease the overcrowding and prevent the district from having to build another large, comprehensive high school in the near future.

Small footprint

The school's footprint of 2.9 acres is miniscule compared with the district's comprehensive high schools with between 40 and 50 acres each, including large sports fields and much larger parking lots. The outdoor space at HeLa includes four basketball hoops but no sports fields. The parking lot is small. In a nod of cooperation to the neighborhood, the district agreed that all students would arrive at the school via school bus. That'll prevent traffic congestion.
The 60,000-square-foot building was designed by LSW Architects and constructed by Skanska USA. If needed, an additional 20,000 square feet may be added later. Its high-tech design is apparent both inside and out. Two levels of solar panels on the south side will help provide power. The floors on the first level are polished concrete, and in the student commons the floor is heated for comfort.
Students will learn real-world nursing skills in the four-bed nursing station, complete with a simulated, interactive robot patient called SimMan. A simulation pharmacy and well-equipped laboratories will provide more hands-on learning. The library, called the research lab, will be stocked with a combination of electronic books and traditional paper textbooks.

Not traditional

HeLa isn't a traditional high school. It won't have sports teams, so instead of a large gym, the school has a fitness room where students will learn lifelong fitness using resistance training, mats, Pilates and medicine balls. There won't be a marching band or pep band, but a scaled-down music program may offer orchestra or symphony.
The first school year, the student body will consist of about 125 freshmen and 125 sophomores. The next two years, 125 freshmen will be added each year, so that 500 students eventually will be enrolled there. Students interested in attending the school completed an application and are being chosen via a lottery system from the district's comprehensive high schools, with an equal number of students coming from each school.
Classes will be integrated to create an overall focus on health and biosciences, Tumelty said. As an example, she said in English class, students will use informational texts and literature that are science-based.
"The goal is for students to see the connections between the disciplines so that they get a better view of how the real world works," Tumelty said. "Teachers will be working on creating these connections in authentic ways for students."
Freshmen and sophomores will take anatomy and physiology along with chemistry and biology "to give them a really good base in science," said Elisabeth Harrington, the district's director of curriculum and instruction. Before they enter their junior year, students will have to choose one of five pathways: nursing and patient care; health informatics (data processing); biomedical engineering; pharmacy; or biotechnology.
"In the first two years, as they're doing A&P, there will be a heavy emphasis on medical terminology," Harrington said. "Once they've picked their pathway, as juniors they'll partner with PeaceHealth with job shadowing opportunities. Seniors will have internships at PeaceHealth."

Who was Henrietta Lacks?

The cancerous cells of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman from Virginia, were harvested in 1951 without her knowledge and cultured for medical research to create an immortal cell line. Her cells were used to develop the polio vaccine, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization and cloning, among other things. Although billions of her cells have been sold for research, her family can't afford health insurance. Her story was told in the nonfiction book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Portland author Rebecca Skloot. This is the first school building in the nation named after her.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Paging Dr. Watson


I did watch Watson defeat the best Jeopardy players in the world, when - last year or so - and of course as an eHealth student, I knew this would be a fantastic machine to program for medicine, in particular, diagnosis.  I knew about other attempts at artificial intelligence for diagnosis like Isabel.  Isabel is one of the leading "differential clinical decision support" tools for physicians.  There were many early experiments in artificial intelligence for medicine, and I believe the editor our our Biomedical Informatics textbook, Edward H. Shortliffe, was also an early pioneer, as the chapter would attest. The writer on this article on "Paging Dr. Watson" mentions a book called "How Doctors Think".  I read it, and it is excellent.  Another book that is relevent is "Every Patient Tells a Story" by Lisa Sanders, who advised on the House TV series.  One theme of the book is the loss of skill in the physical exam by physicians and the over reliance on technology for diagnosis.  I am just saying. 

 

 

Paging Dr. Watson: artificial intelligence as a prescription for health care

October 18, 2012

(Credit: IBM)
“It’s not humanly possible to practice the best possible medicine. We need machines,” said Herbert Chase, a professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University and member of IBM’s Watson Healthcare Advisory Board, Wired Science reports.
“A machine like [IBM's Watson], with massively parallel processing, is like 500,000 of me sitting at Google and Pubmed, trying to find the right information.”
Yet though Watson is clearly a powerful tool, doctors like physician Mark Graber, a former chief of the Veterans Administration hospital in Northport, New York,  wonder if it’s the right tool. “Watson may solve the small fraction of cases where inadequate knowledge is the issue,” he said. “But medical school works. Doctors have enough knowledge. They struggle because they don’t have enough time, because they didn’t get a second opinion.”
According to Chase, doesn’t fully appreciate Watson’s value in bias-free second opinions. “The machine says, you thought of 10 things. Here are the other five,” he said. “You’ve probably seen Jerome Groopman’s book, How Doctors Think, about the mistakes doctors make. A simple one is anchoring: You get stuck to some diagnosis. We’ve all had that experience. A machine can change its diagnostic profile on a dime based on new information. One of the things a machine is not is biased.”
Graber warned that doctors will need to guard against a new source of bias: over-reliance on Watson. “When I use my GPS too much, I never really learn the layout of a new city,” Graber said. “Same story.”
He and Chase also disagree on the implications for health costs. Chase sees Watson helping doctors and patients reduce eliminate unnecessary tests and treatments, whichnow cost $750 billion per year. Graber fears that Watson’s ability to identify many possible diagnoses will encourage patients to ask for even more tests and procedures, setting off a cost-inflating “diagnostic cascade.”  …
(more)

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Autism, Calories, & Marathons

Instead of scouring the world's headlines for ehealth stories for this blog, I have been silently reading 3 books.

1. It is funny how we hear about books. The first I heard about on an interview with James Fitzgerald on CBC radio.  I thought it tragic that both his father and paternal grandfather, who were in the medical profession, had committed suicide.  Then there was the intriguing story about how his grandfather's life was kept secret in a kind of family shame.  It turns out the grandfather, Gerry Fitzgerald, was the founder of Connaught Labs at the University of Toronto, which developed the insulin of Banting and Best, (and a lot of other vaccines for mass public immunization) and was one of the visionary founders and promoters of Public Health in Canada.
What Disturbs our Blood: A Son's Quest to Redeem the Past", by James Fitzgerald.
2. Different ... Not Less: Inspiring Stories of Achievement and Successful Employment from Adults with Autism, Asperger's, and ADHD, edited by Temple Grandin, PhD. I saw the TV special about her and her special gifts working as a designer in the cattle industry.  In my job in research ethics I have seen a lot of research on autism spectrum. The stories of the lives of persons living with the spectrum, or are "Aspies" makes me think how many people I might know or have known who have this condition but have learned how to adapt among all us "neurotypicals".   Someone told me a lot of people leading developments in Silicon Valley are like this.  One of the life stories speculates that even Steven Jobs, one of the founders of Apple Computer, might have had Asperger's syndrome.

3. The book about diet is probably the only one that I won't finish reading, as it is kind of dense, but it also one of the most interesting.  Well written books that question the "conventional wisdom" and science itself are always welcome.  I heard about this book in a conversation with a Psychology professor who had previously told me about another great book that questioned the conventional wisdom, and which I also read, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, by Christopher McDougall

Friday, June 1, 2012

iPatients and Diagnosis

Are physicians losing the art and science of the physical exam because of technology?  Dr. Abraham Verghese in this TED talk refers to the "ipatient" - when the the electronic record is viewed as being of more importance than observation of the actual patient.  The topic of the disappearing art of the physical exam also appears in an excellent book, "Every Patient Tells a Story" by Dr. Lisa Sanders.  Dr. Sanders apparently used to consult on the TV program House, as well as writing a column on "Diagnosis" for the New York Times.  There is a lesson here for health informatics.  I used to think the "virtual patient" would be quite useful to run diagnostic simulations, self-tracking, etc., but this is different.


Monday, May 7, 2012

Paramedic ehealth - bringing out the dead?

I started watching a movie on TVO called "Bringing Out the Dead".  Nicholas Cage was playing the role of a burnt out paramedic in the Hells Kitchen area of New York city - a really run down, high crime area of the city.  Looked like a great movie but I never had time to watch it all so I went online to my public library to place a hold on the DVD.  Turns out they didn't have the DVD, but they did have the book, written by Joe Connelly.  So now I am reading the book and it turns out that Joe Connelly was a paramedic for 10 years in New York, and is writing from front line experience. I have heard that the work of paramedics is an area that is in need of ehealth technologies. I know several researchers personally from my ehealth studies who work in this area. One is studying the messaging systems from the ambulances to the hospitals.  The other developed a mobile app that will allow anyone to locate the nearest public Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) . This latter study is more like public health but it was developed by a former paramedic. < Here > is a link to the paper on it.