This was the coolest thing on display at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, from Geekologie
It’s a smart window from Samsung — basically a one-way window (people on the other side can’t see in) with a full-pane electronic touchscreen display where you can display info, roam the internet, watch adult films, etc., etc. It can even turn into virtual blinds!!!!!1 Just watch the video. The future, ladies and gentlemen — it’s really almost here!
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What’s harder than Living Biblically? Try following every bit of the latest health advice. A.J. Jacobs, author and human guinea pig, shares the results of his latest yearlong quest to become “the healthiest man alive.”
Funny video on healthy living, putting it in some perspective……..
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Read an interesting article about this subject. Interesting not in the sense of costs or efficacy but mostly on how they did it. It’s done for an epidemiological study on a mother child cohort. They wanted to include pregnant women for their study with facebook beside other forms of recruitment such as: active collaboration with health personnel involved in pregnancy and childbirth who distribute leaflets or introduce the study to pregnant women, a website, links to the website on other websites dedicated to pregnant women and participation in online pregnancy related forums.
What they did with facebook was creating a weekly updated facebook page and an advertising campaign on facebook. The advertisement was displayed on personal facebook pages of women aged 18 to 45 with an IP address in Italy whom were selected by 2 keywords pregnancy and delivery )in Italian). The page got a lot of fans (167-450) and during the campaign of 5 weeks 8 participants came to the study through facebook.
Compared to their other forms of recruitment it was not cheap but than again more spin off from the facebook page could not be measured. Talking money, the advertisement costs were 200 euros.
Richiardi, L., Pivetta, E., & Merletti, F. (2012). Recruiting Study Participants Through Facebook Epidemiology, 23 (1) DOI: 10.1097/EDE.0b013e31823b5ee4
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Dysthymic disorder is a mood disorder consisting of chronic depression, with less severe but longer lasting symptoms than major depressive disorder. Since it’s less severe than depressive disorder often psychotherapy will be sufficient to treat this chronic. A recent Cochrane Library review found 17 placebo-controlled double-blind studies in DD, which generally have found significant differences favoring medication treatment form of depression although long term efficacy of treatment hasn’t been studied extensively.
the Cochrane reviewers concluded that drugs are effective in the treatment of DD, with no differences between and within the drug classes; however, that TCAs are more likely to cause adverse events and dropouts than other medication class
I’ve always admired placebo controlled trials since they do deliver the best evidence for efficacy of a treatment especially in depression. Antidepressants are often disqualified for not working only with severe depression. This is mostly due to bad trial design to my opinion. For that reason I want to present a recent placebo controlled trial with escitalopram for dysthymic disorder.
The authors conducted a 12 week, double blind, placebo controlled trial with escitalopram for dysthymic disorder. Of notice is the use of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-II Borderline Personality Disorder module beside other more appropriate depression scales. As the authors mentioned: to exclude suicidal patients which to me hardly seems a reason since other used scales also investigate suicidality.
Non of the primary outcome measures improved significantly after 12 weeks, response and remission did not significantly differ between groups.
All measures of depressive symptoms and psychiatric functioning showed a significant main effect of time, indicating that on average, both the groups showed improvement over time, regardless of treatment group.
Again a plausible result from a study well done. Nevertheless, on some secondary outcome measures some differences were significant. These were social and global functioning.
Hellerstein, D., Batchelder, S., Hyler, S., Arnaout, B., Toba, C., Benga, I., & Gangure, D. (2010). Escitalopram versus placebo in the treatment of dysthymic disorder International Clinical Psychopharmacology, 25 (3), 143-148 DOI: 10.1097/YIC.0b013e328333c35e
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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 of organizations such as with airliner pilots or the military. In those organizations errors are part of their work. They are all expected to be part of the solution to errors than part of the problem. We in health care should also be a part of the solution and put all efforts to achieve succes in fighting against and preventing errors.
Medical education should be the place to start with teaching about the subjects of patient safety.
Research about patient safety is mostly done on procedures such as placing bloodstream catheters in Intensive Care Units. Simulation-based training reduces medical error, enhances clinical outcomes, and reduces the cost of clinical care. Examples in medicine for simulation based training are: laparoscopic surgery, anesthesiology with wireless machines that can blink, breathe, and simulate a plethora of medical illnesses.
It is absolutely the time for physicians, hospital managers, policy makers, patients, and the public alike to demand resources for the development of simulation centers that house modern equipment, with expert faculty to train the physicians of today. These processes must be integrated into the structure of current medical curricula, in order to achieve the highest possible outcomes for our patients.
More applications are on their way with progressing technical possibilities. There’s even a website for the Advanced Initiatives in Medical Simulation. It’s a lobbying coalition of individuals, organizations, and companies who wish to promote medical simulation in order to enhance patient safety, with concomitant error and cost reduction.
Health professions education efforts must require critical safety-related competencies and assess students’ safety knowledge, skills, and behaviors with as much fervor as their knowledge of the Krebs cycle and their ability to determine the differential diagnosis of weight loss.
These elemaents should be in the formal curricula. Every team member should be responsible for patient safety and hierarchie should be leveled. What do you think?
Wagner, D., Noel, M., Barry, H., & Reznich, C. (2011). Safe Expectations Academic Medicine, 86 (11) DOI: 10.1097/ACM.0b013e3182327c81
Aggarwal, R., & Darzi, A. (2011). Simulation to Enhance Patient Safety: Why Aren’t We There Yet? Chest, 140 (4), 854-858 DOI: 10.1378/chest.11-0728
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Amazing video about showing the value of a much appreciated social media forum: Twitter
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Another great rap song, by the famous blogger ZDoggMD bullying the big pharma companies who seek to influence doctors, patients and policy makers with their money. The drug companies with direct advertising to physicians, free samples, and research stipends encourage doctors to over-prescribe medications.
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Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they’re right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry.
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