I’ve been reading Jack Wennberg’s new book Tracking Medicine, which is about his lifetime of work in understanding the reality of how medicine is practiced, as a route to helping us achieve the best care possible for each of us. My first post about this was three months ago, en route to a seminar on SDM (shared decision making); my first post after the seminar was shortly after. The whole subject has bent my thinking about healthcare so severely that it’s taken me this long to decide what to say next.
Key findings:
Your doctors, with the best of intentions and the best of training, may unwittingly be prescribing treatments that aren’t necessary for you, or not prescribing things that are. (“You” includes anyone you’re caring for.)
This realization was developed not through people’s opinions but by looking at cold hard numbers. After controlling for all variables, the odds of a given patient getting a given treatment vary by hundreds of percent from region to region. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*
The Internet has revolutionized how we receive information -- and it’s also changing how we learn about and manage our health. A new “ePatient” movement promises to empower patients with online and mobile tools -- making it easier than ever to contact a physician, track health variables, and join a support group.
Four minutes isn’t much time to summarize an entire movement, and I think I got a little off topic while suggesting a new use case for David Hale’s NIH PillBox (a pill identifier tool). I said it could be used to identify pills even after your pet licked part of the label off them!
For more information about ePatients, check out my earlier blog post.
There’s been a handful of photographers who have tackled the Diabetes 365 project for this year, and I’m proud to be in their company. It’s a very inspiring experience, to see how diabetes is reflected in the lives of the members of D365, and how it is captured through their camera lenses.
Some of us are using our DSLR cameras, some of us our point-and-shoots, some documenting with our iPhones or our Blackberries, but every last one of us is showing our lives with diabetes, every day. I know I’ve talked about this project before, but watching the photos stack up in the Diabetes 365 Flickr group and seeing how, and what, people with diabetes are choosing to document their lives with this disease is incredible.
You didn’t need to join the group in January – it’s a rotating door of participants. If you want to join the Diabetes 365 group, you can jump in anytime and start. Every day can be Day 1.
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
Yesterday, the mail arrived. There were catalogs for clothes (mmmm, can’t wait until May!), letters from friends, the crappy bills that keep arriving even though we didn’t forward them to our new address, and oh yeah, that one bill from my mail order pharmacy.
For a thousand dollars.
Dated January 30, 2009.
So, being the rational and patient woman that I always am, I ripped up the envelope it came in, cursing under my breath like my temperamental buddy, Yosemite Sam. Punctuated each tear of the paper with “fricka-frakin’ insurance bill dagnabit …”
And then I called the mail order pharmacy company.
“Thank you for calling Byram Health Care. Your call is important to us.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
Empowered health consumers know how to take charge of their health and are proactive in their care.
Whether they’re surfing the web for health information, visiting their doctor or health care professional, or a patient in the hospital; empowered health consumers know how to question and communicate.
This blog is a continuation of the “He Said, She Said” post where I promised to give you tips about how to be an empowered health consumer.
Sabriya Rice, CNN Medical Producer had a similar idea.
Here are my 3 tips to help you become an empowered health consumer: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Health in 30*
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Yesterday, the mail arrived. There were catalogs for clothes (mmmm, can’t wait until May!), letters from friends, the crappy bills that keep arriving even though we didn’t forward them to our new address, and oh yeah, that one bill from my mail order pharmacy.
