July 24th, 2010 by Medgadget in Better Health Network, News, Research
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A team from Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School has been analyzing words used in tweets by American users in an attempt to gauge the public mood around the country.
What they discovered was that users on the West Coast seem to be quite a bit jollier than those on the East Coast. It’s not clear whether the data was collected during the summer or winter months and accordingly adjusted, for that surely would affect the readings.
Researchers were able to infer the mood of each tweet using a psychological word-rating system developed by the National Institute of Mental Health’s Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention. The system ranks words based on how they make people feel. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
July 21st, 2010 by RyanDuBosar in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News
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Harvard’s annual primary medicine conference, Pri-Med East 2010, will move the industry-supported portion of the program off-site, and marketing will be further restricted (advertisements had been allowed in bathrooms, for example.) A Harvard official said the new rules are meant to keep doctors from becoming or appearing as industry marketing agents. (The Boston Globe)
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
July 8th, 2010 by Mark Crislip, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News, Opinion, Quackery Exposed, Research
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Some universities have more cachet than others. On the West Coast it’s Stanford that has the reputation as the best. Then there’s Oxford, Yale, and MIT. I would wager that in most people’s minds the creme de la creme is Harvard, where you find the best of the best. If Harvard is involved, a project gains an extra gobbet of credibility. Brigham and Women’s Hospital also has similar reputation in U.S. as one the hospitals associated with only Harvard and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) — premier university, premier hospital, premier journal.
So if Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital are offering continuing medical education (CME) for acupuncture, there must be something to it, right? A course called “Structural Acupuncture for Physicians” must have some validity. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
May 6th, 2010 by David H. Gorski, M.D., Ph.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion, Quackery Exposed, Research, True Stories
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[Recently] I participated in a panel discussion at the Northeast Conference of Science and Skepticism (NECSS) with John Snyder, Kimball Atwood, and Steve Novella, who also reported on the conference. What I mentioned to some of the attendees is that I had managed to combine NECSS with a yearly ritual that I seldom miss, namely the yearly meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting.
There are two huge cancer meetings every year — AACR and the annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO). AACR is the meeting dedicated to basic and translational research. ASCO, as the word “clinical” in its name implies, is devoted mainly to clinical research.
Personally, being a translational researcher myself and a surgeon, I tend to prefer the AACR meeting over ASCO, not because ASCO isn’t valuable, but mainly because ASCO tends to be devoted mostly to medical oncology and chemotherapy, which are not what I do as a surgeon. Each meeting draws between 10,000 to 15,000 or even more clinicians and researchers dedicated to the eradication of cancer. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
April 21st, 2010 by Medgadget in Better Health Network, Opinion, Research
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Dr. John D. Halamka, Chief Information Officer of both Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, has a review up on his “Life as a Healthcare CIO” blog of the Withings Wi-Fi Scale.
The device can now upload readings into Google Health, and Dr. Halamka thinks similar capabilities in other at-home medical devices can be used to evaluate alternative quality contracts that reimburse clinics based on improvement in preventive care.
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
