Earlier this week we facetiously found out how sex is being used to teach CPR. Now the American Heart Association is turning to rap to teach CPR basics in its Be The Beat campaign:
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
This is shaping up to be a big week for the Wii in medicine — not only is the American Heart Association’s endorsement of Wii and new partnership with Nintendo making waves, but today is a day we’ve marked on our calendar for a while: Trauma Team for Wii was released [May 18th].
After years of trauma center releases focusing on surgery (some of which we’ve written about here), this is the first offering that lets gamers delve into emergency and pre-hospital care.
Of course, the game runs counter to standard teachings (in one demo video we saw a practitioner abandon her airway procedures to tend to an abdominal wound) and is at least as unrealistic as prior offerings — but then again if we wanted more accuracy, we could just go to work…
Product page: Trauma Team
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
This week, coffee seems to be good for the heart:
“People who are moderate coffee drinkers can be reassured that they are not doing harm because of their coffee drinking,” said Arthur Klatsky, the study’s lead investigator and a cardiologist at Kaiser’s Division of Research.
These “surprising” data are to be presented at the AHA meeting March 5th. (You’ll have to wait until then to get the REAL scoop, it seems.)
But a quick Google search on Dr. Klatsky’s earlier studies using the same questionaire database shows the problems with using questionaire data to make such sweeping conclusions. Take, for instance, these findings from 1973: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
Are medical conferences becoming obsolete? I think so.
It was apparent to me at the Heart Rhythm Society Scientific Sessions meeting and now a similar trend was noticed by Dr. Steven Sedlis at this year’s American Heart Association meeting:
It felt like a ghost town. I ran into Ira Schulman, my medicine resident at Bellevue when I was a third year medical student; we looked at one another and simultaneously blurted out “where is everybody?”
. . .There are probably numerous reasons for plummeting attendance at AHA. The economy, the on-line publication of trial results prior to presentation, the ubiquity of conference calls, e-mail strings and yes blogs that keep one in regular contact with colleagues throughout the country and the world without the need for face-to-face encounters are just some of the obvious causes.
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
On the heels of the American Hospital Association’s recent demonstration of gross discrepancies in the Dartmouth group’s data, MedPAC released its December 2009 report to Congress showing the same. Confirming data for 2000 (reported in their 2003 report), MedPAC demonstrated much less variation among states and metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) than described by Dartmouth for states or hospital referral regions (HRRs). Closer scrutiny of MedPAC’s data reveals even more. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at PHYSICIANS and HEALTH CARE REFORM Commentaries and Controversies*
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…
