Short story, long impact: A haunting, thought-provoking piece of “what if” fiction on The Health Care Blog drives home the point that healthcare comes from human hands, but not necessarily human hands on a keyboard. “Please Choose One”

Privacy for sale: On The Doctor Weighs In, Paul Levy tackles the thorny topic of employer-sponsored health insurance plans offering incentives for “wellness” activities. Are we selling our (privacy) birthrights for what amounts to a mess of pottage? “Selling your right to privacy at $5 a pop”

Mea culpa from on high: From the Hospital Leader blog, the President of the Society of Hospital Medicine, hospitalist Dr. Burke Kealey, takes a look at the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM)’s recent rethinking of its Maintenance of Certification (MOC) rules. It may sound like inside-baseball, but Kealey’s post is very readable, and shows that large professional organizations – like, say, ABIM – who ignore their members’ input do so at their own peril. “We got it wrong. We are sorry.”

Too much of a good thing? If you’ve gone “krazy for kale” you might want to read this, and adjust your intake accordingly. Moderation is a virtue, even when it comes to virtue. From WBUR in Boston: “The Dark Side Of Kale (And How To Eat Around It)”

Patients included, lab edition: There’s a new journal in town. Specifically, a journal about and for patient involvement in medical research. It’s called Research Involvement and Engagement – and it’s an open access journal, meaning no pay-wall. Here’s a post announcing its birth on BioMed Central: “Partnership with patients in a new publication”

Caterpillar races: In a thread on the SPM email listserv, one of our members shared a link to this article with the subject line “the caterpillar is coming,” meaning that the slow roll that is medical practice change might be shifting. In a 2012 research paper re-published this month in Wiley Online Library, a group of researchers share the findings of a study about how a feeling of powerlessness can kill patient engagement before it arrives. “Patients’ engagement in primary care: powerlessness and compounding jeopardy. A qualitative study”

Tongue in cheek: We found a new (to us) site/blog, Life in the Fast Lane, that has a great sense of the absurd in medicine, along with some great content on emergency and critical care. Here’s some satire from their archives: “Reducing the budgetary burden of disease“