Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Latest Posts

Interesting Idea: Using Twitter To Answer Simple Healthcare Questions

Obviously not, but it can provide us with some new solutions. That’s why I wanted to share askCH, an interesting project.

AskCH is a one-of-a-kind healthcare tool. Send a healthcare cost or definition question in the proper format, and receive the answer with a link to find detailed information!

ask twitter

Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Controversy: Can Twitter Cause Memory Damage?

At this year’s British Science FestivalTracy Alloway, a psychologist from Stirling University, said the following:

Some examples of what can hurt or harm working memory include things like Twitter. When you’re receiving an endless stream of information when you’re a ‘tweeter’, it’s also very succinct, so there’s no need to process or manipulate that information, it’s not a dialogue unlike something like Facebook where you might be updating your status and so on.

british science assoc

Fortunately, Mark Henderson at Times Online puts things in the right place:

Most people I know who use Twitter see it as an interactive tool for conversing with wide groups, and for drawing like-minded people’s attention to information that might interest them. It’s interactive, full of links, and information-rich. It’s a misconception that the 140-character limit makes depth impossible. In fact, to me, Twitter seems to build social networks just as effectively as Facebook, which Alloway thinks might improve working memory.

Mark is right, and I have a few examples that can explain why I think so:

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Search Engine Medical FAIL

I wanted to write about Healthbase, a new medical search engine, but David Rothman was faster. He found some serious mistakes in the search itself.

healthbase logo

Well, the concept to reduce the number of results to a definitive list of categories is a good one. But it leads to some mistakes. First, it searches in databases such as Wikipedia. You cannot find a bigger fan of Wikipedia than me, but still it’s not suitable for such a search engine.

Second, sometimes there are strange things in the results. Only one example below. It seems to suggest that a possible treatment for diabetes is mouse. Of course, it just found articles mentioning mouse models in the research of diabetes treatments, but it cannot deal with the information properly.

healthbase

So there are a lot of things to do before becoming the ultimate engine. Until then, my suggestion is Scienceroll Search, the first personalized medical search engine:

scienceroll-search

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Google Wave – For Scientists

Cameron Neylon posted a nice video about how scientists may use Google Wave in the future. I saw it myself in action at this year’s Science Foo Camp in San Francisco, but it would be nice to have a really huge base of early adopters soon.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

What Happens When You Put An MRI Machine Near A Large Metal Object?

I’ve come across this image on Fail Blog. Magnetic Resonance Imaging + beds with ferromagnetic parts equal…

mr fail

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

Read more »

How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

Read more »

The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

Read more »

Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles