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Latest Posts

What’s Fueling Technological Advances? A Free Market

So I have a Droid.  I purchased it in July, not long after taking my old flip-phone for an oceanic bath at Hilton Head, SC.  I waffled for a long time.  In fact, I almost purchased a Casio phone that was marketed as water and impact resistant.  ‘Mil-spec,’ was the phrase used…a phrase which appeals to me as a one-time Air-Guard flight surgeon.  What it meant to me was, ‘you can’t hurt it.’

Still, I was attracted by medical applications and the assorted other cool things a Droid can do.  I mean, my old phone didn’t have a Magic 8 Ball, for crying out loud!  More to the point, my old phone didn’t have Epocrates, or the Emergency Medicine Residents Association Guide to Antibiotic Therapy.  It lacked a flashlight, an mp-3 player, a protractor and a scientific calculator.  (It also weighed a fraction of my Droid, but that’s what belts are for). On my old phone, I couldn’t have taken a photo of an ECG, turned it into a pdf file, and e-mailed it to our fax-impaired cardiologist. Read more »

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

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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