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The Year In Review: Social Media Medical Stories

2011 was a very intense and exciting year regarding the developments and new insights of the relationship between medicine/healthcare and social media. Here are my favourite stories from 2011 selected and featured month by month.

January

I had the honour to be included in the Advisory Board of the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media; I wrote about how a Samsung Galaxy Tab changed totally my online activities, how Google Translate can be used in medicine and featured HealCam, a medical alternative of ChatRoulette.

February

Facebook diagnosis by surgeon saved a friend; there was a lively discussion whether pharma companies can edit Wikipedia entries about their own products, it turned out Wikipedia can be a key tool for global public health promotion; and Scienceroll won the Best Medical Technology/Informatics Blog category for the third time in a row in the Medgadget’s Weblog Awards.

March Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Parents Get Tattoo In Support Of Their Diabetic Son

I was just making preparations for the top 2011 posts I’m planning to write in the upcoming days when I bumped into this cute story about a diabetic kid who felt ashamed to wear the insulin pump so his parents got insulin pump tattoos.

Some parents get tattoos of their child’s name, but Philippe Aumond and Camille Boivin went one better.

In a show of solidarity, they each have an image of an insulin pump tattooed on their abdomens, declaring that they are “forever linked” to their son Jacob.

“It is a great thing for him, and we were thrilled just to see his smile when he saw those pumps. It made our day, that’s for sure,” said Boivin, 36, from the family’s home in La Sarre, Que.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Apps Allow Viewer To Study 3-D Details Of Human Anatomy

I remember when I had to study all the details of human anatomy from textbooks and some old books with many pictures, but I didn’t have a chance to see things in 3D (which would have made it much easier to understand, learn and memorize). After medical school, I started to discover new apps and solutions for this problem.

I’ve been using the Biodigital app on Google Chrome, it’s free but a bit hard to use.

And recently, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

3-D Bone Scaffolding System May Aid Surgeons In Facial Reconstruction

It would be fantastic to use 3D printers to produce bone replacements:

Now, Washington State University engineers are unveiling a unique implementation of the tech that could aid in the regrowth of damaged or diseased bones. Utilizing a ceramic compound, the group’s optimized ProMetal 3D printer builds dissolvable scaffolds coated with a plastic binding agent that serve as a blueprint for tissue growth. The team’s already logged four long years fine tuning the process, having already achieved positive results testing on rats and rabbits, but it appears there’s still a ways to go — about 10 -12 years, according to the project’s co-author Susmita Bose — before orthopedic and dental surgeons can begin offering “printed” bone replacements.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

A Venn Diagram For Hemorrhoids

It’s quite clear not everyone would like to read long medical reports and text as sometimes a well-designed and structured graph can say more than a hundred words. Do you remember the Wired article about the blood test makeover that described how our blood test results would be designed to show more easily understandable information to patients?

Well, this Venn diagram shows many things about hemorrhoids and related symptoms. And it’s not even a new infographics published on a blog but is from an old textbook which means the concept has been there for a long time but it always disappears in medicine.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

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