November 18th, 2011 by StevenWilkinsMPH in Opinion, Research
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Abraham Verghese, MD, Standford University
My wife has two world-class oncologists who help her manage her Stage 4 Lung Cancer. Both are excellent clinicians. Yet their skills differ in one very important way. Her radiation oncologist physically touches her a lot (in a good way of course!). There are the touches on her arm, a hand on the shoulder, hugs, and of course a thorough hands-on physician exam. Her medical oncologist not so much.
We all recognize the therapeutic value of touch. Dr. Abraham Verghese, a Stanford Physician and Professor, at the 2011 Med2.0 Conference, described the power of touch associated with the physical exam. In the following scenario he describes an interaction with a chronic fatigue patient who came to him after being seen by many other physicians: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Mind The Gap*
September 18th, 2011 by DrWes in Health Policy
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It was kind of funny reading this recent article from the New York Times that focuses on a relatively small health data breach from Stanford Hospital’s emergency room:
A medical privacy breach involving Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., led to the public posting of data for 20,000 emergency room patients, including names and diagnosis codes, on a commercial Web site for nearly a year, the hospital has confirmed.
Since discovering the breach last month, the hospital has been investigating how a detailed spreadsheet made its way from one of its vendors, a billing contractor identified as Multi-Specialty Collection Services, to a Web site called Student of Fortune, which allows students to solicit paid assistance with their schoolwork.
Gary Migdol, a spokesman for Stanford Hospital and Clinics, said the spreadsheet first appeared on the site on Sept. 9, 2010, as an attachment to a question about how to convert the data into a bar graph.
Although medical security breaches are not uncommon, the Stanford breach was notable for Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
September 4th, 2011 by Iltifat Husain, M.D. in News
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Add Yale’s School of Medicine to the growing list of medical schools that are embracing the iPad as the primary source of medical teaching.
This upcoming year Yale will be giving their medical students, all 520 of them, an iPad 2 with an external wireless keyboard. We’ve covered with great depth the growing list of medical schools using iPads as the main tool for learning — such as Stanford, UC-Irvine, and many more.
“Yale School of Medicine this year will outfit all students with iPads and no longer provide printed course materials. The initiative, born out of a going-green effort, could Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
September 3rd, 2011 by ChristopherChangMD in Research
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Gluing blood vessels together, just like gluing a cut garden hose together, does not seem like a great idea at first, but Stanford researchers just might have figured out how to do this safely and effectively.
Over the past century and still currently used today is to hand-sew the cut ends of the blood vessel together using stitches. This method of reattaching blood vessels is time-consuming and tedious, especially when the blood vessels are tiny.
In this new glue method which is FIVE times faster, a special substance is Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Fauquier ENT Blog*
August 10th, 2011 by AndrewSchorr in Opinion, Research
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You have heard it countless times, “The War on Cancer.” President Nixon announced it. The National Cancer Institute has spearheaded what TV and radio commercials always talk about as “the fight against cancer.” Singular. But we really need to start thinking about it as a plural. Wars on cancer. Fights against cancer. Taking it one step further, we need to see each person’s fight as an individual battle. Not just individualized to the patient’s spirit or age or sense of hope, but individualized to his or her particular biology, matched up with the specific cancer and available treatments. That is the nature of “personalized medicine” applied to cancer. We’ve been talking about it for a few years around here, but what’s exciting now is that even more super smart people in the cancer scientific community are devoting themselves to it.
I met two people like that today near the research labs at the University of Washington in Seattle. Without giving too much away (they’ve got big plans), these two hematologist-oncologists, with many advanced degrees between them and decades of experience, are trying to build something really big that could lengthen lives and save many too.
What they’re trying to do is Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Andrew's Blog*
