e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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Daily Digest: Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Ready, set, DIGEST! Here’s today’s harvest of what we think is worth reading, participatory-medicine division:

  1. Bob Wachter, who is one of the founders of the Society of Hospital Medicine and the hospitalist movement, has a great blog called Wachter’s World. Here’s the latest post, an interview with Andy McAfee, self-tagged “technology optimist” and associate director of the Center for Digital Business at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. It’s a terrific conversation about the intersection of tech and humanity, in medicine and elsewhere. “My Interview with ‘Technology Optimist’ and 2nd Machine Age Coauthor Andy McAfee“
  2. One of our favorite primary care MDs, Dr. Peter Elias, is an SPM member who teaches regularly, and well, on many topics, including using technology tools to enable better doctor-patient communication. In this post, which is essentially a report from the front lines of family practice by someone who knows, Peter tells us why he keeps teaching: to achieve a state of what he calls reflective competence. “I teach to remain a learner“
  3. Leonard Kish is a terrific writer and thinker on health IT. He’s the one who coined the phrase “patient engagement is the blockbuster drug of the 21st century.” Here’s his review of Dr. Eric Topol’s latest book. “8 Takeaways from Topol’s Latest: ‘The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands’”
  4. Forbes.com writer Dan Munro put up a provocative post this morning, quoting something said at the Clinton Health Matters Initiative event last week in southern California. The title speaks for itself, and Dan’s take on it is solid. “Founder Of Oscar Health: ‘A Lot Of People In This Industry Are Just Evil’“
  5. NPR Morning Edition had a great piece this morning about a group of patients literally going for a TKO on Parkinson’s. Our MedX friend Sara Riggare has been in what she calls “Parkinson’s fight club” in Portugal recently, so this resonated for us. “Fight Parkinson’s: Exercise May Be The Best Therapy“
  6. For those of us on the healthcare beat, understanding science and research reports is critical. It’s also not easy, which explains why major media outlets get the science, and therefore the story, wrong sometimes. One of the best sources for news analysis on medical and health science stories is Health News Review. They had a funding challenge last year, and had to shut down for a while, but they’re back, and better than ever. Here’s their analysis of recent headlines about a nasal spray that’s targeted at treating Alzheimer’s disease. “Nasal spray shows promise as treatment for Alzheimer’s disease“
  7. And today’s humor is an oldie but goodie from Allie Brosch, the cartoonist behind Hyperbole and a Half. Here, she shares the new pain scale she created, which we think is both (a) funny and (b) more accurate than the pain scale you’ll see in common clinical practice. “Boyfriend Doesn’t Have Ebola. Probably.“

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Daily Digest: Monday, February 2, 2015

 

Welcome to a new feature: the Daily Digest, by my friend and fellow SPM member “Mighty Casey” Quinlan, of Richmond, VA. Her Facebook feed and Twitter feed are so constantly full of things I’d missed that I thought “Shoot, let’s post that!” So this month, Monday through Friday, she’ll post links to what she thinks are the best/hottest/most interesting healthcare, medicine, and bio-science stories that day. Here she goes:

Yeah, there might even be some humor, since we’re both fans of Gomerblog and ZDoggMD.

Today’s crop:

  1. The human brain is a fascinating instrument. This piece from the NY Times’ Well blog looks at the impact price awareness has on the placebo effect. The outcome is both surprising, and not surprising at all. “Expensive Drugs Work Better Than Cheap Ones“
  2. Are minute clinics, where patients can walk in for quick care on stuff like strep throat or flu shots, better patient experiences than care at a regular primary care practice? Geriatrician Dr. Leslie Kernisan had the opportunity to compare two of her own experiences, which she shared on The Health Care Blog: “A Tale of Two Sore Throats: On Retail Clinics and Urgent Care“
  3. How far would you go for medical care? Would you go all the way to Thailand? Morgan Spurlock, the guy behind “Supersize Me,” now has a CNN series called “Inside Man,” where he looked at the rise of medical tourism in the face of rising U.S. healthcare costs. “Surf, sand … and surgery? Inside the world of medical tourism“
  4. Our friends at Symplur, the healthcare data visualization gurus, asked and answered a great question on their blog recently about patient communities and New Year’s goals. Christopher Snider posted this, and it’s a great read. “Looking Forward to Looking Back – How Do Patient Communities Approach New Year’s Goals?“
  5. Connected health and quantified-self have gotten a lot of ink, both physical and virtual, over the last few years. With the rise of self-tracking tools, from Fitbit to AliveCor to Scanadu, patients with chronic conditions and early-adopter tech mavens are monitoring their physical status with more and more granularity. Can connected health penetrate the “actual medical practice” membrane? Here’s a list from The Doctor Weighs In blog: “Five Accelerants to the Adoption of Connected Health“
  6. Because we mentioned humor, and Gomerblog, and ZDoggMD in our intro, here’s a three-fer: a post about Turntable Health, ZDoggMD’s new comprehensive care clinic in Las Vegas, on Gomerblog. It’s not a new post, it dates from May of 2014, but it is definitely worth a read for the laughs. NOTE: this post is SATIRE. “Big Pharma and Mega Hospitals ‘Scared Beyond Belief’ of Tiny Las Vegas Health Clinic“

That’s it for today – check back tomorrow, we’ll have a fresh list of must-reads for you!

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Recent events and postings, March 14

Corrected Saturday afternoon: “Stanford” should have been “UCSF” (University of California, San Francisco)

Boy, is the pot starting to bubble. Word about participatory medicine is spreading, and there are signs that it’s starting to follow the trajectory of other cultural movements. News and posts elsewhere in the past week:

e-Patients.net: Surgeon: “Participatory Medicine encourages partnership between patient and provider”

There’s a stage in every movement where it starts to get discovered by people in the establishment who weren’t among the founders. And there’s another stage, when that person’s discovery spreads into mainstream media. That happened Thursday, in Richmond VA, when a cardiac surgeon wrote a piece with the title above, including this:

Today, there is a movement afoot — one that is welcomed by me and many of my colleagues. It’s a change that I hope will become the norm when it comes to the physician-patient relationship. It’s all about partnerships between patient and provider.

To hear a surgeon say that – one who just met us recently, at last fall’s Medicine X conference – is hot stuff. It’s especially important that none of the society’s founders were involved – the discussion now has a life of its own.

e-Patients.net: Words Matter – Let’s Reconsider the Term “e-Patient”

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Recent posts on other sites, 2/2/14

Note to email subscribers: I’m not sure which of today’s posts you’ll get first. If you haven’t seen today’s other post, about my July Blue Button speech, please see it below. It’s an important declaration about the future of health IT.
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Last weekend I started something I hope to continue: a weekly post summarizing things I’ve written on other blogs. I’m doing this to keep in touch with subscribers here, as I reach out through other channels.
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Recent posts on other blogs, 1/25/14

The first link in this post was wrong. Fixed. Thanks, astute reader!

For ages I’ve thought that when I write something elsewhere I should at least notify my subscribers here. (Plus, ahem, it may help my forgetful self remember WHERE I wrote about something…)