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.
Surgeon and engineer Todd Kuiken is building a prosthetic arm that connects with the human nervous system — improving motion, control and even feeling. Onstage, patient Amanda Kitts helps demonstrate this next-gen robotic arm.
Amazing and impressive with creative solutions.
Recently discussed an excellent book about How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman, a hematologist-oncologist staff physicians at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
In this review I mentioned the probable cognitive errors a doctor can make, but most important how patients can help their doctors to prevent these cognitive mistakes in some way.
For patients the book can be of value since it teaches them tricks, questioning in order to help the doctor improve his or hers reasoning. Patients can help doctors not to make cognitive mistakes by simple questioning thereby influencing the cognitive processes. For instance the question: What’s the worst thing this can be?, can help the doctor to broaden his view, think more open about a problem, not jump to fast to conclusions. Another example is the question: What body parts are near where I am having my symptoms?
Fortunately the author of the book Jerome Groopman, a hematologist-oncologist and endocrinologist Pamela Hartzband published one of their columns on KevinMD. Besides describing three possible cognitive errors made by doctors in a far better way than I can, they also suggest some remedies. They propose a few simple questions that a clinician can ask himself or herself to protect against falling into one of these thinking traps.
Please read this excellent post when interested in cognitive errors on KevinMD: Three major cognitive errors physicians make. Even better subscribe to the blog on which the author often posts excellent articles on this subject.
This animation film was submitted by a med student to YouTube for the instructor of a course about ‘Narratives of Ageing:Exploring Creative Approaches to Dementia Care’.
Students visited a locked unit at a care facility for people with Alzheimer’s disease. They used YouTube to watch streamed video made by Alzheimer’s disease advocacy groups, twitter was used for real time communication between med students and instructors, Skype was used to interact with and talk to various experts.
The instructors took and uploaded pictures to Flickr of students and residents interacting. Several students used these pictures for a creative final project which resulted in a scrapbook that was given to the residents. And one of them produced this animation film.
This is one of two innovative pilot studies done with graduate med students and social media. Students rated both courses highly, mentioning the helpfulness of social media.
On the down side: demands on time outside the classroom; concerns about privacy, and lack of facility with technology.
Social media can augment learning opportunities in many medical schools, and help students acquire tools and skill sets for problem solving, networking and collaboration in the 21st century. The command of such technologies will be increasingly important to the practice of medicine in the 21st century.
I think they used social media very creatively, but was it worth while? What do you think?
George, D., & Dellasega, C. (2011). Social media in medical education: two innovative pilot studies Medical Education DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2923.2011.04124.x
Bought this book based on several reviews. I was especially interested in the topic of cognitive and affective processes influencing decisions in doctors. At first a little disappointed because the book has a lot of anecdotes and interviews with doctors about their mistakes and how they learn from these mistakes. These anecdotes and interviews are interesting reading and very well written. After about a third the anecdotes become more interesting to me because they are linked with the cognitive and affective complications influencing decision making in doctors.
Some examples of these cognitive and affective processes influencing decision making
It also has some nice explanation of research on radiologists. Should they look at the broad picture, go with the first impression or should they use a checklist and describe every item on that list. Moreover, how far or near to the clinical question when present should the radiologist go in his description of the procedure?
The last part of the book is about drug companies influencing doctors. Even trying to influence guideline committees and opinion leaders all for the sake of money.
For patients the book can be of value since it teaches them tricks, questioning in order to help the doctor improve his or hers reasoning. Patients can help doctors not to make cognitive mistakes by simple questioning thereby influencing the cognitive processes. For instance the question: What’s the worst thing this can be?, can help the doctor to broaden his view, think more open about a problem, not jump to fast to conclusions. Another example is the question: What body parts are near where I am having my symptoms?
In short a very well written book for physicians and patients. Not a short textbook about cognitive and affective influences on decision making by physicians.
Surgeons not being the most social animals among doctors, I was surprised to see 7 editorials about surgery and social media. These seven editorials highlighted the use of social media and different settings for surgeons, from medical school all the way up to the American College of Surgeons. “Most tummy tucks can be divided into what would be considered a ‘full’ abdominoplasty or a ‘mini’ abdominoplasty. The full abdominoplasty is much more common”. This also influences social media, tummy tuck Sydney offers form and function restored at the same time.
The most factual contribution was about the implications of social media such as twitter, blogging and facebook on the next generation of physicians. In this editorial a recent study was cited. They found a difference in the use of social media between residents and medical students. 13% of residents and 64% of medical students at the University of Florida, Gainesville had Facebook profiles. Suggesting a 6 fold increase in the number of social media users in the next generation of physicians. I think this is an underestimation. The authors also state that from the profiles of these residents and medical students 70% contained photographs with alcohol of which 10% to 50% implied excessive drinking. Furthermore, 30% displayed inappropriate images of overt sexuality, foul language, and patient privacy violations.
As a result, residents and medical students are at a comparably high risk of having their profiles viewed by unintended persons thereby jeopardizing individual credibility as well as that of his or her institution.
More positive were the contribution of medical students and residents. Some uses of medical students of social media:
Residents were very interested in physician-only online social networks. this editorial collected an impressive amount of these networks such as sermo, medscape connect, tiromed, and doctorshangout.com. They also emphasized the social aspect of social networking sites especially since they lack sufficient time to keep up with other networks than their working network.
Social networking sites can serve as an invaluable tool for keeping in touch with friends and colleagues from past educational and work experiences and for medical trainees to share news and photos with geographically distant loved ones.
All in all an interesting number of editorials in Surgery of varying optimism and content.
Another useful health application developed with game engines. Relax in a beautiful virtual world when you can’t go there. The real environment is to be preferred but not everyone is able to go there. Interesting research, not only a good idea but also proven effective after the research, hopefully.
Reporter Daniel Cressey takes a trip to the University of Birmingham for a walk through a virtual world. By recreating the positive effects of spending time in natural environments, Bob Stone and his team hope to help those who can’t get out and about by bringing these environments to them.
From a structured review of websites of 1800 US hospitals focusing on their Facebook, Twitter and Youtube accounts:
In short, used social media for unidirectional communication.
Thaker SI, Nowacki AS, Mehta NB, & Edwards AR (2011). How U.S. hospitals use social media. Annals of internal medicine, 154 (10), 707-8 PMID: 21576547
This time-lapse video was made for a video contest for residents. It’s a look inside a busy time in the OR, showing all the people involved during different procedures. Fine example of why hygiene is such an important topic in hospitals. More videos in this contest here
In this video a certain Dr Oz gets dissed, if that’s the right word. For all god reasons you can read them at ZDoggMD. A phenomenon not very popular were I live, fortunately.
What do you think?
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