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

Latest Posts

Do Physicians Have A Moral Obligation To Engage In Social Media?

Some physicians may be hesitant to participate in social media outlets, like Facebook and Twitter.

Well, get over it.

Great post by pediatrician Bryan Vartabedian who addresses this topic. Indeed, physicians have lost control of the online message, especially with, according to recent data, 60+ percent of patients visiting the web first when looking for health information.

Instead, anti-vaccine proponents and homeopaths have embraced the Internet, and now exert tremendous influence on patients. We doctors have no one to blame but ourselves for being so slow to get online. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*

Hospitals And Social Media

Ed Bennett is the Director of Web Strategy at the University of Maryland Medical System and the real expert of how hospitals use social media. He has just published his recent slideshow focusing on this issue.

Key line: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

The Rise Of The Medical Blogosphere

It would appear that doctors and nurses in the social space have finally arrived. This week marked the first Blog World Expo with a track dedicated to the medical blogger. BWE brought together some of the web’s most visible medical minds including Kevin Pho (KevinMD), Rob Lamberts (Musings of a Distractible Mind), Kim McAllister (Emergiblog), Bob Coffield (Health Care Law Blog), Paul Levy (Running a Hospital) Mike Sevilla (Doctor Anonymous), and Nick Genes (Blogborygmi), and many more.

From health privacy to the ethical obligation of doctors to be visible on Twitter, the panel-based dialog at Blog World Expo raised as many questions as answers. Medical professionals in the online space face remarkable challenges, especially with regard to transparency, personal boundaries, and the definition of patient privacy. It’s clear that our technology is ahead of our legal and ethical dialog. Read more »

AHRQ: Please Get A Social Media Strategy

Last night, I saw a commercial produced by the federal government.  Called “Questions are the Answer,” it’s a call for patients to be engaged in their medical care, to ask questions of their doctors in order to be sure of their medical condition.

The commercial was excellent – it showed a man asking dozens of increasingly arcane questions about a cell phone he was thinking of buying.  Then, it showed him in his doctor’s office, apparently after getting a diagnosis.  “Do you have any questions?” the doctor asks.  “Nope,” says the man.

The government agency that produced the commercial is the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.  There are a series of other videos and tools that can help you be a better, more informed consumer if you get sick.

The only catch:  it’s almost impossible to find any of this great material.   Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*

Nursing Student Expelled For Blogging

When University of Louisville nursing student Nina Yoder blogged about her experience watching a patient give birth in a post entitled “How I Witnessed the Miracle of Life,” she may have thought she was just blowing off some steam. Well her school saw things very differently.

When school officials read Yoder’s post, which included a description of the baby as a “creep” and “a wrinkly, bluish creature, all Picasso-like and weird, ugly as hell, covered in god knows what, screeching and waving its tentacles in the air,” they moved to expel her from school by calling her into an office, searching her for weapons (apparently because Yoder had separately blogged about her support for the Second Amendment), and informing her she was no longer enrolled at the school. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at code blog - tales of a nurse*

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