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Kitchen Spoons: Not A Great Way To Measure Medicines

A Spoonful of Medicine:  Not a good thing

A recent study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that people who use a kitchen spoons to pour liquid medicine aren’t getting the right dosage. Here’s what to use to get it right.

Use your kitchen spoon for food, not to measure medicine

Measuring Precisely is Vital

Ask any pastry chef or professional baker, and they’ll tell you that using exact measurements in baking is critical for a successful end product. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Health in 30*

Why It Takes Time To Get Pain Medicine In The ER

druggie:loc

Migraine.

Three days.

Out of pain medication and vomiting so you wouldn’t keep it down, anyway.

Agony.

Emergency department.

*****

You’re in luck –  no one in triage!

A bed opens up, the nurse takes you straight to a room.

Gown, blanket.

And….

Two minutes later you send your cousin out to ask how long it will be until you get your pain med.

Excuse me? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Emergiblog*

Online Advertising 3.0: Harnessing Social Media Users For Precision Targeting Of Friends

Do you advertise on your social networks? You might not think that you do, but every time you tweet or update your status on Facebook or post a picture to Flickr, you’re advertising – perhaps not with commercial or self-promotional intent, but you are advertising something: an item of news, a humorous post or a moment from your vacation. I don’t believe that Advertising is bad; but there is bad advertising, the kind that pointlessly interrupts and annoys and leads to no action.

As the Web expands and evolves from a tangle of static web pages towards social and real time streams, Advertising will need to evolve into a suppler and friendlier animal. Google may have perfected Advertising on the traditional web platform, but the door is open to new players who can socialize advertising. It’s not an easy task: the bull’s eye of targeting customers is getting tinier everyday. Enter MyLikes, a start up which has taken on the task of helping advertisers reach their base. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Phil Baumann*

Why Is It Taboo For Doctors To Discuss Death With Patients?

Back in the day when I was a newspaper reporter I completed a biomedical ethics fellowship at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, VA. In addition to sitting in on the hospital’s bioethics committee discussions, I spent much of the week shadowing a nurse in the ICU.

They called her the Death Nurse because her job was to intervene with doctors, nurses, patients and families when the time came for a patient to move from the ICU to hospice. While her title was Supportive Care, she flat out told her me her job was to help people die; not actively, but from behind the scenes by helping patients and those caring for them understand when the time had come to move from curative care to supportive care (email me if you’d like a copy of the article I wrote about her). Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Debra Gordon on Medical Writing (and other medical topics of interest)*

Top 12 Features That Twitter Should Offer

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
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).

  1. 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*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

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…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

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…

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Latest Book Reviews

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…

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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…

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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…

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