Found this excellent video on CasesBlog, with advice for doctors and reactions on twitter. CEO Toby Cosgrove, MD, shared this video, titled "Empathy," with the Cleveland Clinic staff during his 2013 State of the Clinic address on Feb. 27, 2013. The video relates to any person - not only patients and physicians. It's so worth it 4 minutes of your time ..read more »

This video shows excellent use of evernote and IdeaPaint for interactive learning but why should it be kept for high school, could think of a few examples to use it in medical education, can you? Let me know in the comments. Read some more on this on evernote blog When you combine IdeaPaint’s ability turn any wall or surface into a canvas and Evernote’s ability to capture, archive and make that surface searchable, the possibilities for turning any room into an interactive environment are endless. These two products come together in a particularly exciting way in a classroom environment, which can become .....read more »

When searching in pubmed for the two mesh terms "patient safety" and "medical education" results in 8 hits. Some research articles and editorials. One quote with literature reference about the extend of the problem is: Our health care system today has an adverse event rate approximately equal to that of driving an automobile putting patients at a significant risk The trouble as stated in this excellent editorial in Academic Medicine is the culture in which most health care professional work. Unfortunately working in a health care setting is mostly not about preventing errors or finding solutions to errors as in other sorts .....read more »

Teaching patient safety starts in medical school. Hospitals can be weired chaotic places. It's often a wonder everything keeps working as it should although failures do occur. Medical professionals come to realize that mistakes happen and they adapt their working procedures to those of the so called high reliability organizations such as aircrafts, airline pilots, forest firefighting teams and trauma centers. This change in mostly culture doesn't go swiftly mostly with the excuse that their work is different from those organizations mentioned. Their work is incomparable to other organization which is not true, moreover some principles can easily be adapted .....read more »

We have been trying to use twitter during lectures, especially since the group is so large about 100 to 200 can only follow the lecture from another lecture room on a monitor. It wasn't a success, the question time during and after the lecture was hardly used. Only 8-10 questions were proposed via twitter. The interaction did increase but only with those present in the same lecture room. These were bachelor med students. Next we tried facebook during a week with master med students. The number using the group was more than 100, which is probably around half of the .....read more »

Always like a very different view of matter of opinion. Via Annemarie Cunningham discovered a thought provoking blog post: rethinking medical education from The Health Care Blog. Based on all the new medical technologies, super specializations, increasing cost of medical care, and cost of medical education, a new approach to medical education is put forward. This appraoch is mainly focused on shortening the duration of medical education in the US. Nevertheless, these ideas are worth considering also in Europe and the UK. This blog post proposes the following structure for medical education: Two years of medical education taken by all students. .....read more »

A 34 year old female was brought in to the emergency department Friday afternoon. She was a mother and a quick search of her belongings provided her business card. It was the card of a obviously successful businesswoman; however, it did not provide any further useful information to explain her presentation. The family doctor was contacted. She explained that besides a remote history of a short depressive episode the patient was quite healthy. She was unable to assist in contacting any family members. The patient was displaying ‘‘bizarre behavior,’’ along with refusing to open her eyes for an examination. A psychiatric cause .....read more »

Because with difficult cases doctors tend to use refelective reasoning for diagnostic decisions. Reflective reasoning is effortful, conscious analysis of features exhibited by a case. When engaged in reflection for solving a case, physicians tend to more carefully consider case findings, search for alternative diagnoses, and examine their own thinking. A recent study indicated that reflective reasoning positively affected diagnoses of complex cases, whereas it made no difference in the diagnosis of simple cases Nonanalytical thinking is based on the recognition of "illness scripts". Physicians tend to recognize these patterns of symptoms very easily especially when having more experience. This type .....read more »

One possible mechanism for diagnostic errors made by physicians is the availability bias. Clinical reasoning is one of the most important achievements after med school. Flaws in clinical reasoning can result in diagnostic errors and medical mistakes. Availability bias is the doctor who diagnoses a certain disease more often since it comes to mind more easily. This is often helpful since things that come to mind easily generally do occur more frequently. For instance a flu pandemic could result in to easily diagnosing the flu instead of probable other diseases, pneumonia in it's first appearance can be easily overlooked. That's .....read more »

A plea for the importance of physical examination, becoming an art? Modern medicine is in danger of losing a powerful, old-fashioned tool: human touch. Physician and writer Abraham Verghese describes our strange new world where patients are merely data points, and calls for a return to the traditional one-on-one physical exam. ..read more »