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Latest Posts

NLM Launches Mobile-Friendly PubMed Search App

Recently, we reviewed six medical apps for the iPhone and iPad that promised mobile PubMed searches — an essential functionality since the PubMed.gov website is extremely difficult to view on a smart phone. As of last week, this is no longer the case. The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) just launched a mobile friendly version of PubMed.gov last week.

The Web App they have created is currently in beta, and as of this publish date, if you go to PubMed.gov on your smart phone’s browser you will still be directed to the original non-mobile friendly website. However, if you point your phone’s browser to the following URL, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/, you are presented with the mobile version of the site.

The National Library of Medicine states the significant increase in mobile browsing for medical content is one of the key reasons they released this mobile web app. The folks at the NLM already have a plethora of mobile medical web apps available, such as the recently added MedLine Plus.

Continue on to see pictures of the PubMed app in action. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

I’m Glad Economists Aren’t Practicing Medicine

I was invited to speak at the National Library of Medicine’s 2010 Annual Conference. Today I heard fellow speaker Uwe Reinhardt, Ph.D., discuss healthcare economics, and although his presentation was entertaining, as a physician I found it to be rather disturbing.

On the one hand I understand Reinhardt’s desire to engage Americans in a rational conversation about limited healthcare resources. My friend Dr. Rich Fogoros has been calling for this for many years. Yet, I was disappointed by his enthusiastic reductionism — that peoples’ lives should be reduced to a mere societal cost equation. He also said that, “When America grows up, it will look a lot more like Europe,” and cited a conversation with Dr. Phil Gingrey as an example of the congressman’s over-valuing human life. Read more »

Pillbox: Identify Pills By Color, Shape, Size And More

Pillbox is the result of a partnership between the National Library of Medicine and the Food and Drug Administration. It helps you identify unknown pills and tablets by parameters such as form, color, size or imprint. The constantly updated database now has more than 7,000 entries with images.

Pillbox was developed to aid in the identification of unknown solid dosage pharmaceuticals. The system combines high-resolution images of tablets and capsules with FDA-approved appearance information (imprint, shape, color, etc.) to enable users to visually search for and identify an unknown solid dosage pharmaceutical. Read more »

*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…

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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…

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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…

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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

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…

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