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Monitoring An API For Your Body: How Could This Tool Be Helpful?

As self-quantification tools becomes more accessible, we’re able to monitor and collect all that’s coming, going and happening with our bodies. Some are beginning to think of this aggregate data as something of a health code, a repository of personal information which can be opened up to others – an API for your body. Once opened and tapped, others can create tools for manipulating and analyzing the data. Aggregated information that’s presented in the right way can give us and our providers valuable information about our physical status.

Loic Le Meur, the founder of Europe’s biggest Internet conference, raised the dialog here. It’s a fascinating concept and one that plays on the themes of personalization, measurement, and mobility.

This has implications in pediatrics, of course. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*

Pediatric Physician Joins Collaborative Network And Sees Improvement In His Work

I never thought I’d change the way I practice medicine.  But I recently enrolled as a provider in the Improved Care Now (ICN) collaborative network and I’m already working differently.

ICN is an alliance of gastroenterologists and patients working in a new model of pediatric inflammatory bowel disease care based on the analysis of thousands of doctor–patient visits as well as the latest studies and treatments.  Doctors and patients apply this information, experiences are tracked in an open registry, the results are then shared and refined to improve care.  I can see what I’m doing well and where I’m falling short relative to other clinics and pediatric gastroenterologists.

ICN is under the direction of Dr. Richard Colletti of the University of Vermont.  ICN is supported by the Chronic Collaborative Care Network (C3N), the brainchild of Cincinnati Children’s qualitymeisters, Peter Margolis and Michael Seid.  I flew to Cincinnati earlier this week to catch up on C3N and what appears to be a first step into medicine’s future.  More on the specifics later.  But suffice it to say that I’m stoked about where this is all headed.

A couple of thoughts after enrolling my first few patients: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*

Does Accutane Cause Inflammatory Bowel Disease? The Evidence Is Weak

At home the kids’ current TV show of choice is How I Met Your Mother, supplanting Scrubs as the veg out show in the evening. Both shows are always on a cable channel somewhere and are often broadcast late at night. Late night commercials can be curious, and as I work on projects, I watch the shows and commercials out of the corner of my eye.

Law firms trolling for business seem common. If you or a family member has had a serious stroke, heart attack or death from Avandia, call now. The non-serious deaths? I suppose do not bother. One ad in particular caught my eye: anyone who developed ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease (collectively referred to inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD) after using Accutane, call now. Millions have been awarded.

My eye may have been caught because of my new progressive lenses, but I will admit to an interest in inflammatory bowel disease, having had ulcerative colitis for years until I took the steel cure. It also piqued my interest as these were three conditions among which I could not seen any connections. Accutane, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s. One of these is not like the other. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*

Inflammatory Bowel Disease Puts Patients At Risk For Some Skin Cancers

I stumbled across this review article (first full reference below) earlier this week.

Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States.  Most skin cancers form in older people on parts of the body exposed to the sun or in people who have weakened immune systems (such as inflammatory bowel disease patients on immunosuppressive therapy).

According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), in there were more than one million new cases of nonmelanoma skin cancers (NMSC) in the United States in 2010.  There were less than 1,000 NMSC deaths during the same time.

NMSC includes  squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and basal cell carcinoma (BCC).   Both occur more frequently on sunlight-exposed areas such as the head and neck. BCC is far more common than SCC and accounts for approximately 75% of all NMSC. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*

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Latest Book Reviews

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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…

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

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