Haiti: What Will Happen When The Cameras Leave?
Nine days after the devastating earthquake that rocked Haiti, media attention is beginning to wane. What will happen next, when the cameras are off? Read more »
Latest Posts
Top 12 Features That Twitter Should Offer
- Image via CrunchBase
After returning to Twitter after a week-long break, I’ve had the chance to look at the service with a freshened perspective. Twitter needs to stay simple – that’s what drives its success. Nevertheless, I believe Twitter needs to mature and provide exploits of its service. While the basics of Twitter aught to remain, Twitter, Inc. can build a wider ecosystem around those basics which could make it a true contender as an important part of the Web.
Services like Posterous and Friendfeed offer features such as replying via email. Although third-parties could develop similar features via Twitter’s API, it’s time that Twitter mature a bit. If Twitter plays its cards right, it could offer itself as much more than just as the modern equivalent of a telecommunications utility (which it is).
- Email content, replies, DMs. We should have an option to respond to replies & DMs via email. There are services out there such as Topify but they don’t provide the most secure methods. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Phil Baumann*
What Are The Root Causes Of The Primary Care Shortage?
It’s no secret that without a stronger primary care foundation, the current reform efforts are unlikely to be successful. If anything, it will only delay the inevitable.
I wrote last month that one discussed solution, adding more residency slots, won’t help: it would simply perpetuate the disproportionate specialist:primary care ratio.
A recent op-ed in The New York Times expands on that theme. The authors suggest that not only does primary care need to be promoted, specialist slots should be limited. Simply building more medical schools, or adding more residency slots, without such restrictions will only add to the number of specialists.
Already, many primary care residency slots go unfilled – what’s the point of adding more?
You have to solve the root cause that shifts more students away from primary care: disproportionately low pay, disrespect that starts early in medical training, and poor working conditions where bureaucracy interferes with the doctor-patient relationship.
Until each of those issues are addressed, simply more spending money to produce more doctors simply isn’t going to work.
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
Google Drop-Down Menus Tell You All You Need To Know
A post on Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational draws our attention to Google as a source of data for all sorts of research into human emotions. Dan Ariely, the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University, believes that by using drop down suggestions in Google, we can gain insights into “what people might care the most about concerning a given topic. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
Should We Be At War With Salt?
The problem with the Western diet is not one of deficiency, but one of excess. We get too much of a good thing – too many calories, too much of the wrong kind of fat, and too much salt. As a result obesity, diabetes, and hypertension are growing health problems.
There also does not appear to be an easy solution – voluntary diets founded primarily on will power are notoriously ineffective in the long term. Add to that is the marketplace of misinformation that makes it challenging for the average person to even know where to apply their (largely ineffective) will power.
It can be argued that this is partly a failure, or an unintended consequence, of market forces. Food products that provide cheap calories and are tasty (sweet, fatty, or salty) sell well and provide market incentives to sell such products. Consumers then get spoiled by the cheap abundance of tempting foods, even to the point that our perspective on appropriate portion sizes have been super-sized. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
