April 15th, 2011 by RamonaBatesMD in Opinion, Research
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I’ve spent some time thinking about this survey. I couldn’t find any better information on the survey than the press release from the University of the West of England (UWE). Perhaps in the future it will be published in a journal for better review.
The survey was apparently done by the new eating disorder charity The Succeed Foundation in partnership with the University of the West of England (UWE). The editor’s notes indicate 320 women (ages 18 – 65 years, average age 24.49) studying at 20 British universities completed The Succeed Foundation Body Image Survey in March 2011.
Notably, the survey found that 30% of women would trade at least one year of their life to achieve their ideal body weight and shape. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*
April 15th, 2011 by Iltifat Husain, M.D. in News
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At iMedicalApps, we’re always wary of physician surveys that claim to predict mobile use. We even did a feature article highlighting how sampling bias could be inflating the numbers of many of these surveys.
With that said, Bulletin Healthcare just released a survey based on a large sample size of physicians, using the following methods:
The analysis, based on the reading habits of more than 550,000 healthcare providers, including more than 400,000 physicians who subscribe to Bulletin Healthcare’s daily email briefings, focused on mobile device usage between June 1, 2010 and February 28, 2011.
While the report went on to talk about the increased usage of mobile devices by physicians, with Apple continuing to dominate the market — the iPhone and iPad had a more than 90% share of physician use — we were more interested by the intriguing comparison of physician mobile use by speciality.
Their survey found that Emergency Medicine physicians and cardiologists were the highest users of mobile devices and content, while Pathologists and Oncologists were the lowest. Of note, the survey looked at specialists, not primary care. Emergency Medicine physicians had more than double the usage of mobile technology than Pathologists, 40% verse 16%. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
April 15th, 2011 by Dr. Val Jones in Announcements, Quackery Exposed
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A few days ago I published a blog post about Dr. Mehmet Oz NOT being a trustworthy source of health information. It set off a firestorm of blog comments, tweets, and Facebook sharing – all because people (like me) had developed sincere concerns about the safety of viewers who might take his advice to heart. The outpouring of commentary, and the rapidity of the response made me wonder: can we harness this power for future good? Could we counter Dr. Oz’s (and others like him) misinformation with peer-reviewed content that’s easily accessible by Twitter and Facebook?
I chatted with some colleagues and concerned patient advocates on Twitter (including @academicobgyn @scanman @hrana @AmberMBaylor @DamonRamseyMD @RyanMadanickMD @jalbietz @DrElizabethLee @FaceliftMD @goodwillstacy @PWestcott ), and we all agreed that it would be a great service to have vetted health tweets available for people to read and retweet. If enough of us were regularly engaged in retweeting sound health stories and information, we could potentially drown out the “miracle cures” and snake oil that drives us all nuts.
So how would this work?
I’d like to get a small group of volunteer experts together – healthcare professionals committed to science and common sense – and have them read and approve links before they are promoted on Twitter. I have created a new Twitter account called “HealthyRT” – the volunteer experts will have access to this account and can promote content that is medically sound. I hope that the word will be spread about this account, and people will subscribe to the feed and RT links that they find helpful. In this way, everyone on Twitter has the power to RT good health content, and it takes very little effort for retweeters to be engaged.
Now, there is no guarantee that the feed will be perfect (no peer-review process is) but every effort will be made to ensure that it is not used for self-promotion or that the standards lapse over time. If there are any concerns, people can direct message the HealthyRT team and we’ll keep us on the straight and narrow with the help of the crowd (as it were).
This experiment could fail or peter out… or it may become the greatest anti-snake oil strategy in Internet history. It all depends on the commitment of the reviewers and the extent of our subscriber base. But I’m willing to give it a try… and I hope you are too!
Anyone interested in becoming a HealthyRT reviewer, please email me directly: val-dot-jones at getbetterhealth.com.
Everyone who’d like to help to promote good health content – and drown out the bad – please subscribe to HealthyRT and retweet it as much as possible.
Please use the comments section here if you have ideas about how to improve this strategy. Let’s do it!
*You can follow us now at: http://twitter.com/#!/HealthyRT *
April 15th, 2011 by Glenn Laffel, M.D., Ph.D. in Research
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The use of Motrin, Aleve and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) is associated with erectile dysfunction, according to a study by scientists affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
The apparent link surprised the scientists. They had hypothesized that the commonly used pain-killers would actually reduce the risk of erectile dysfunction since NSAIDS protect against heart disease, which has in turn been linked to the troubling condition.
To reach their surprising conclusion, Steven Jacobsen and colleagues used data from Kaiser’s HealthConnect EHR, an associated pharmacy database, and self-reports about NSAID use and erectile dysfunction from an ethnically diverse population of 80,966 men between the ages of 45 and 69.
After controlling for age, ethnicity, race, body mass index, diabetes, smoking status, hypertension, high cholesterol and coronary artery disease, the scientists found that men who used NSAIDS at least 3 times per day for at least 3 months were 2.4 times more likely to experience erectile dysfunction than those who did not consume them on a regular basis. The link persisted across all age categories.
Remarkable in its own right was the finding that overall, 29% of the men in the study reported some level of erectile dysfunction.
The authors emphasized that their findings do not prove that NSAID use causes erectile dysfunction. For example, the study findings could have been confounded by factors not considered by the scientists (such as subclinical disease or the severity of the comorbid conditions that were studied), and the chance that NSAID use was actually an indicator for other conditions that caused erectile dysfunction.
In addition, the scientists recognized that their study had some limitations. These included an inability to temporally link NSAID use and the development of ED, and possible selection bias.
As a result, they cautioned men against discontinuing NSAIDs based solely on the findings of their study. “There are many proven benefits of non steroidals in preventing heart disease and for other conditions. People shouldn’t stop taking them based on this observational study. However, if a man is taking this class of drugs and has ED, it’s worth a discussion with his doctor,” Jacobsen said in an interview.
The write-up appears in the Journal of Urology.
*This blog post was originally published at Pizaazz*
April 14th, 2011 by DrWes in True Stories
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It was 11:00 pm when the pager vibrated, then beeped: it was the ER, Hospital #3.
“This is Dr. Fisher returning your page?”
“Thank you Dr. Fisher, just a moment for Dr. Frigamafratz.”
A brief pause, then:
“Wes, I think we’ll need your services. Old guy, found down at the nursing home, brought in unconscious, pulse 25 – hooked him up to an external pacer, he’s back with us now.”
“I’m on my way.”
When I arrived, there was the usual cacophony of activity in the Emergency Room. Someone screaming in one corner. Intercom sounding. Ambulance en route to our location. Breathing treatments underway in Bay 5. Room 10 headed to the CT scanner. Has room 12 got a bed? By comparison my patient was easy: his disposition in the eyes of the ER staff had been made: he was on the Express Track to the EP lab.
There he was, chest twitching. Big forceful jerking. He was a big guy, uttering something with purpose but impossible to understand. Next to him, his wife, just arriving and removing her coat. “Is he going to be okay?”
My head scrambled for an answer. “He’s okay for now,” I think I replied. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
