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Democracy, Tyranny, And The Online Revolution

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Image by pomarc via Flickr

When status quos collapse, for whatever reasons, are their replacements necessarily better? Does the demise of traditional media powers mean that new media powers will lead to more Democracy? Will cultivated professions which require years of training and mistakes and experience – such as Medicine – give way to amateurs who can succeed in creating appearances of Authenticity?

Last century, not everybody could publish their thoughts without expending some form of considerable energy. Now, with Twitter, anyone can tell the world what s/he thinks at virtually zero expense (save the time value of their tweets). This is no doubt a radical shift in communications and publishing and connecting.

It’s easy to call this democratizing. But is it? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at phil baumann online*

ABC News: The ePatient Revolution

I recently spoke at the first annual ePatient Connections conference in Philadelphia. I’ll be discussing the ePatient revolution (patients participating in their healthcare decision-making using Internet tools) at ABC news channel 8 live this morning with Dave Lucas. During the segment I’ll be referring to several websites that people will want to check out. For those of you who saw the segment, welcome to my website!  Here are the links:

1. Doctors answer questions for free at MedHelp.org Did you know that 9 of the top 11 hospital centers in the country offer access to their physicians for free at MedHelp.org? As part of a PR effort, hospitals are volunteering their doctors’ time to make sure that ePatients can get their questions answered by a reputable source.

2. Identify those mystery pills. Thanks to David Hale at the NIH, a new pill identifier tool is now available online. It’s called “PillBox” and it will soon allow you to search its large pill database by describing the color, shape, and letter/number codes printed on the tablet. Eventually, you may even be able to take a photo of the mysterious pill and have PillBox automatically identify it for you! Today, unfortunately, photo resolution on most cell phones and cameras is not sufficient for this feature to work. Read more »

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