The new Ritmo Advanced Pregnancy Sound System from the Nuvo Group of Columbia, South Carolina, gives an interesting twist to “In Utero,” the title of the famous Nirvana album.
“Research in human fetal development shows that babies exposed to music while in-utero display advanced intelligence, coordination, and learning abilities,” says the product website. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
According to a doctoral thesis to be presented by Jan Bergström at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) via the Internet is just as effective in treating panic disorder as traditional group-based CBT. It’s also apparently efficacious for the treatment of mild and moderate depression.
Access to conventional CBT is limited in Sweden, so an Internet-based CBT was developed in which the patient undergoes an Internet-based self-help program and has contact with a therapist by email. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
Jon D. Duke, M.D., a medical informatics fellow at the Regenstrief Institute at the Indiana University School of Medicine, has created an easy-to-use graphical online tool called RXplore that allows physicians and other healthcare providers to retrieve adverse reaction data for multiple medications simultaneously, and with an intuitive visual representation.
With RXplore, a physician can easily call up a visualization of the top 10 side effects of a specific drug or ask only for side effects relating to a particular specialty, such as gastroenterology. Alternatively, the doctor may request a snapshot of those drugs that cause a particular symptom, such as liver problems. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
Now that Google has become a near-universal information provider for many people, it’s finding itself answering questions that need a little more of a nuanced approach.
Apparently prodded by a mother who was looking for poison control contacts in an emergency, Google is now providing relevant phone numbers at the top of search results for a few specific queries. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
Scientists at Rutgers University are studying the female orgasm using functional MRI (fMRI).
During the experiment, women masturbate with the help of a dildo inside the fMRI machine so the team can study which areas of the brain are activated by arousal.
First they map the cervix, uterus, and clitoris to regions of the brain to create a sort of sexual homunculus. Then the women get ten minutes to stimulate to an orgasm, which is signaled to the researchers by raising a hand. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
