Diet and Nutrition. Natural Health, and Healthy Living

"The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business..."

- William Osler

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The (not huge) world of Health 2.0, participatory medicine and ePatients has been fretting itself about a comment Susannah Fox (all hail) elevated into a post called “What’s the Point of Health 2.0”.

Here’s an excerpt from the comment from DarthMed,

The remaining 95% of “patients” out there are not motivated to become informed, or invest the time/energy/money in using any of these tools. These are the folks that know that fast food isn’t healthy, but are just too tired to choose differently. Some (emphasis on some) will do a standard google search when they receive a new diagnosis at best. Yet these are the folks – often folks with multiple chronic (often preventable) health problems, many overweight, on multiple medications, sometimes social problems – that have the real issue that needs fixing.

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Are we finally ready to close the door on the much-disputed link between the MMR vaccine and autism?

On January 30, Britain’s General Medical Council ruled that Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist, had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in conducting his research that established a link between autism and the MMR vaccine. And yesterday, the British medical journal Lancet finally retracted the resulting 1998 study authored by Wakefield that helped drive MMR vaccination rates in the U.K. down to the point where in 2008, measles was officially declared “endemic” in the country.
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Lumosity users and research collaborators often ask us for more information on the science that goes into the games and training applications on the site. To help make this info more accessible, we have just published The Science Behind Lumosity.

This document describes the background brain science, the principles upon which the brain games and courses were designed, and some of the research done using Lumosity. The goal was to break down the science of Lumosity into terms that anyone can understand while creating a comprehensive and precise presentation of the research.

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Scientizing the Other: Science, Medicine and the Study of Human Difference, 1800-1950

A one-day postgraduate student conference to be held at Churchill College, University of Cambridge

22 June 2010

For the last two hundred years, members of the scientific and medical establishments have represented and misrepresented peoples of different class, sex, race, age and ability in their efforts to chart human variation. This conference will explore how science has been used to evaluate the ‘other’ in society, and will examine the various means by which seemingly objective conclusions were reached concerning whole segments of the population.

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Gilles Frydman is one of the leading ePatients. He started and runs ACOR (Association of Cancer Online Resources) and has discussed the role of engaged patients with rare diseases at the last few Health 2.0 Conferences. We'll be hearing more from Gilles in the US this year, but first we're inviting him to present at Health 2.0 Europe. His twitter name (@kosherfrog) reveals Gilles’ ethnic and national background, so we thought he was a very appropriate person to discuss both the future of online patient activism, and the Health 2.0 scene in the US and Europe.

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The Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Sciencehas opened registration for its 2010 Conference, and has made the final program available for download(PDF).

The 2010 Conference will take place on March 5-6 in Louisville, KY. For anyone interested in the history of medicine and science, and in particular in the history of medicine and science in the Southern U.S., the program looks rich and exciting.

I do have the privilege of presenting a paper, and it is a paper I have been working on for some time, on the history of yellow fever in Galveston, and the relationship between theories of disease causality and public health policy. I wrote a first draft of this paper as a graduate student, and since then have slowly and painfully been revising and improving it. Frankly, it is not quite there yet, and I look forward to the comments and suggestions from the audience and attendees at the Conference.

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Ezra Klein haspublishedanengaging seriesofinterviewsregarding the filibuster, and the prospects and shape of reform for the Senate’s much maligned rule of procedure. The prospects for reformdon’t look particularly bright. And as we come to reckon with one of the final products of the filibuster floor, the Senate’s health reform bill, we may want to take a moment to consider the filibuster itself– this need for 60 votes.

Kleinwrites

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"Oft expectation fails, and most oft there

Where most it promises; and oft it hits

Where hope is coldest, and despair most fits."


All's Well That Ends Well (II, i, 145-147)

 
 



2009 began with a bang for legacy Electronic Health Record (EHR) vendors, promising strong sales and windfall profits on the heels of stimulus package incentive bonuses initially worth more than $19 billion to doctors and hospitals. But things changeddramaticallyalong the way.

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On December 1, 1999, the Institute of Medicine released a report entitled To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System. Although its authors hoped to spark a national movement, they had little cause for optimism. After all, early efforts by advocates like Berwick and Leape and organizations like the National Patient Safety Foundation had barely moved the needle of public and professional attention.

The IOM Report succeeded beyond its framers’ wildest dreams, and the movement they spawned turns ten today. Please indulge me while I spend a nostalgic moment recalling the remarkable spin that launched the patient safety field. I’ll then segue to a summary of my assessment of what we’ve accomplished over the past decade (I outline this more fully in an article in this week’s web version of Health Affairs, which I hope you’ll take a look at).

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