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February 17, 2015 By Casey Quinlan Leave a Comment

Daily Digest: Short stories, mea culpas, and more

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“

Filed Under: Digests Tagged With: Burke Kealey, Hospitalist Leader blog, Life in the fast lane, patient driven research, patient engagement, Paul Levy, satire, The Doctor Weighs In, The Health Care Blog, WBUR Leave a Comment

February 2, 2015 By Casey Quinlan 2 Comments

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!

Filed Under: Digests Tagged With: Daily Digest, epatient, Gomerblog, humor, Leslie Kernisan MD, medical tourism, Morgan Spurlock, NY Times, Society for Participatory Medicine, Symplur, The Doctor Weighs In, The Health Care Blog, ZDoggMD 2 Comments

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