Updates from tweetmedicine RSS
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10:18:26 am on May 6, 2009 |
medtweeps! #polypill RT @jobsworth “been thinking about innovation and business models. would welcome comments, advice” http://bit.ly/pFmNn
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08:20:04 am on April 29, 2009 |
“Using financial incentives to achieve healthy behaviour” http://is.gd/vioo “Paying people to change their behaviour can work, at least in the short term.”
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06:42:55 am on April 24, 2009 |
“Target: Malaria” (By PETER CHERNIN) http://is.gd/uekV “We have the tools to fight a major disease of the world’s poor…there is both local and international will to stamp out malaria”
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02:26:03 pm on August 13, 2008 |
Revolution or Evolution in Health?
For as long as I can remember, we have heard a lot more about revolution than evolution in the healthcare ’space’. David P. Hamilton has some advice for aspiring healthcare entrepreneurs:
“…It’s beginning to look a lot like Steve Case’s much-hyped healthcare revolution — known, fittingly enough, as Revolution Health — is running out of steam. And it’s not exactly a huge surprise, since Revolution serves as an excellent object lesson in how to waste a ton of money trying to change the healthcare system without really understanding it.
So, here’s some free advice for the next wealthy serial entrepreneur who thinks they can change the healthcare system: Focus on one thing and do it well, and think hard about taking on a truly fundamental challenge — like busting up the ossified health-insurance system, for instance…”
(hat tip: @kevinmd via Twitter)
So, whose fault is that money gets wasted on medical/health projects by people who do not understand the issues? Are doctors and other front-line (coal-face!) workers to blame for ceding the initiative or not engaging appropriately? The NHS in England is another example where the government imposes priorities and micro-manages politically biased ‘change’. How or when will this situation get better?
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01:39:01 pm on August 13, 2008 |
Doctors are human beings too- although most see job satisfaction as the main incentive, money has become increasingly important; why is this not right?
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10:24:35 am on August 13, 2008 |
Medicine, Memory and Balanced Equations
Does Medicine encourage and demand memorizing of apparently useless information, or is memory good in itself as a creativity tool?
WSJ had a recent article by James Freeman on “Raising Bob Costas: Is Memorizing Sports Trivia Good for the Brain?. A couple of letters agree with Freeman. Samuel E. George, M.D., gives an account of the Nobel laureate Linus Pauling’s thoughts on the role of memory in creativity:
“…He believed strongly that memory of isolated facts lay at the core of intellect and creativity….In the mid-1930s, he was riding a train from London to Oxford. To pass the time, he came across an article in the journal, Nature, arguing that proteins were amorphous globs whose 3D structure could never be deduced. He instantly saw the fallacy in the argument — because of one isolated stray fact in his memory bank — the key chemical bond in the protein backbone did not freely rotate, as was argued. Linus knew from his college days that the peptide bond had to be rigid and coplanar. He began doodling, and by the time he reached Oxford, he had discovered the alpha helix.”
As medical students in India we were advised to just memorize organic and biochemistry equations in balanced format; so we wasted no time trying to balance them and I felt that helped us focus on the ideas rather than the mechanics of the equations. I tend to agree with Dr.George’s paraphrasing of Pauling:
“…It’s what you have in your memory bank — what you can recall instantly — that’s important. If you have to look it up, it’s worthless for creative thinking…”
In this age of change, with the advent of instant ‘knols’, is human memory irrelevant? or is it more important precisely because machines are getting smarter than us? Or is that a wrong question?
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07:57:06 am on August 13, 2008 |
Medicine and the Future(s) of the Web
Oliver Marks says in his latest ZDNet post “The semantic web can be quite a hard concept to grasp when discussed in an abstract way”. Our own Dean Giustini asked us to ‘make way for the semantic web’ in an editorial in the BMJ on ‘Web 3.0 and medicine’.
I am throwing open this thread to ask “what are plausible futures for the Web in relation to Medicine“? ‘Medicine’ being an inclusive term for health and its related domains.
Hopefully, this discussion would grow to generate a few Scenarios- stories of how we see our own futures as macro, mini and micro bloggers too?
