Yesterday, DrRich noted (with his usual affecting humility, modesty, self-deprecation, &c.) that the Covert Rationing Blog has been named a Finalist in the 2009 Medical Weblog Award Competition, in the category of Best Health Policy/Ethics Blog. He now calls to his readers’ attention the fact that, among the other two finalists - both of which are of very high quality and undoubtedly are more deserving of this award than DrRich - is none other than the ACP Advocate Blog.
The ACP Advocate Blog, written by Bob Doherty, is a publication of the American College of Physicians, and its purpose is to explain, elaborate on and advocate for the ACP’s positions on important matters related to health policy and medical ethics that affect its members, namely, internal medicine specialists. Doherty - who DrRich does not know, but of whom he has heard many very complimentary things - is an insightful analyst of matters related to healthcare policy, and to boot he is an excellent writer. DrRich is a loyal reader of the ACP Advocate Blog, which in fact has habitually led off DrRich’s blogroll.
Here’s why this is interesting. While both the ACP Advocate Blog and DrRich’s blog are finalists in the medical ethics category, it so happens that DrRich and the ACP are far apart on that very issue. Read more »
A year and a half ago we unveiled Medpolitics, a website for doctors to blog about the legislative, regulatory, and public policy issues revolving around the business of medicine.
Today we’d like to present the new and much improved Medpolitics, that anyone can join and participate in using the new, more intuitive and much spiffier interface. Whether you are a health care strategist, doctor, nurse, patient, or just a citizen concerned about the state of medicine, this is the place for you to bring up debates, offer solutions, announce events, organize groups, or find friends and establish professional contacts.
Healthcare is obviously a major topic today in society, and we feel that there should be a real forum for everyone to express their views, offer new ideas, and discuss details that are often ignored by all the noise in the media. Medpolitics allows anyone to blog, post videos from YouTube, and create discussion forums by topic.
If the future of healthcare is important to you, this network will be an ideal outlet for expressing your individual voice. Registration takes seconds and you can start right away.
One of the attendees to this year’s TEDMED was the venerable Steve Wozniak, founder of Apple Computer. Steve is an engaging person so he wanted to show us his NIXIE tube wrist watch and how he uses it to intimidate fellow airline travelers. It ain’t medical, but is surely amusing:
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
Next Monday, the Nobel Foundation will announce the winner(s) of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In the following two days, two more Nobels will be revealed: in Physics and in Chemistry. Because of the success of last year’s inaugural Guess-A-Nobel Contest, we decided we’ll repeat this event annually until there is no more science worthy of the prize. This year we’re giving out three 8GB Apple iPod Touch devices to those who correctly guess in each of the three science categories. Because we profile a good deal of apps for the iPhone/Touch platform, we thought this might be a useful tool beside all the fun it can provide on the off time. Furthermore, if someone does manage to guess all three correctly, he or she will be getting the souped-up 64 GB version of the iPod device with all the trimmings.
A team from Arizona State University decided to redesign the toilet, brazenly removing the seat and forcing the user to apply yoga techniques while flexing a variety of muscles. Perhaps the old fashioned among us, can choose to multitask on the commode with a bit of some light reading. No doubt some of our readers can do that, some yoga, and chew gum at the same time.
ASU reports:
The Flo toilet is an ergonomic, sustainable design concept for baby boomers that functions like a squat toilet. Designers maintain that using the Flo toilet is akin to yoga - by building and strengthening abdominal and back muscles. Only one-half to one gallon of water is used for flushing and The Flo reuses water from hand washing. To flush water from the tanks to the toilet, the Flo employs an electromagnetic ball valve. Go With the Flo also is free of mechanical parts. The toilet is fully self-sustaining and independent of electric power.
A five year old British girl who had her outer limbs amputated due to meningitis (meningococcemia with meningitis accompanied by gangrene of the extremities would be our guess) has received a new pair of legs.
The high tech carbon fiber pair is of the variety commonly seen on competitive Special Olympics athletes, some of whom run faster than old fashion legged people. Ellie’s parents say that she already walks twice as fast as her previous conventional prosthetic pair.
We believe that medical devices will greatly improve Ellie’s life in the future, and hopefully she can one day receive a proper pair of Deka arms.
Although scratching has been everyone’s favorite method of removing an itch for thousands if not millions of years, scientists have not been able to uncover the neurological mechanism of this action. Now a team of University of Minnesota researchers used the long-tailed macaques as subjects in an experiment that showed that the nerves being scratched send different signals to the spinal cord and then to the brain depending on whether there’s an itch in the area. In addition to being a peculiar finding, this may lead to the development of stimulation devices that address acute itching, pain, or other nociceptive phenomena.
From the abstract in Nature Neuroscience:
Spinothalamic tract (STT) neurons respond to itch-producing agents and transmit pruritic information to the brain. We observed that scratching the cutaneous receptive field of primate STT neurons produced inhibition during histamine-evoked activity but not during spontaneous activity or activity evoked by a painful stimulus, suggesting that scratching inhibits the transmission of itch in the spinal cord in a state-dependent manner.
An interesting case of electrical interference has been reported by Danish physicians in the New England Journal of Medicine. A patient with an implanted cardiac defibrillator was taking a shower when he got zapped twice for no apparent reason. The physicians, speculating on the cause of the events, sent an electrician to the man’s house to see if some type of electromagnetic interference could have been at fault. Turns out that a self-installed washing machine didn’t have its ground cable connected, turning house wiring into the washing machine’s private radio station.
The US Army’s National Museum of Health and Medicine stores a gigantic digitized archive of prints and photos from the Civil War to Vietnam. The head archivist of the museum now started a project to make the collection available to the general public through Flickr. The initial set so far contains about 800 images, but thousands more should be coming soon.
Heart Disease Awareness And The Four Hottest Controversies In Cardiology
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
If you want to improve the health of Americans why not look around the world for places where people live the longest healthiest lives and try to copy whatever it is they’re doing That’s exactly what Dan Buettner has done. He is the author of The Blue Zones Lessons for…
This past weekend s international science communication conference ScienceOnline also saw the first final hardback copies of Rebecca Skloot s long-awaited book make it into the hands of the science and journalism consuming public. Moreover an excerpt of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has just appeared in the new…
Earlier today I wrote a short article which resulted in correspondence with one of the authors of the new book FDR s Deadly Secret by Steven Lomazow and Eric Fettmann. Dr. Steven Lomazow sent me a copy of his Archives of Dermatology article with Dr. Bernard Ackerman this photo and…
War can paradoxically bring out the best in people. Despite the violence tragedy and pain there are moments of kindness compassion and brave camaraderie. Soldiers band together as brothers and sisters under terrible circumstances to offer their lives in support of a nation they deem just and vulnerable. Often they…
Next Monday, the Nobel Foundation will announce the winner(s) of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In the following two days, two more Nobels will be revealed: in Physics and in Chemistry. Because of the success of last year’s inaugural Guess-A-Nobel Contest, we decided we’ll repeat this event annually until there is no more science worthy of the prize. This year we’re giving out three 
A team from Arizona State University decided to redesign the toilet, brazenly removing the seat and forcing the user to apply yoga techniques while flexing a variety of muscles. Perhaps the old fashioned among us, can choose to multitask on the commode with a bit of some light reading. No doubt some of our readers can do that, some yoga, and chew gum at the same time.
A five year old British girl who had her outer limbs amputated due to meningitis (meningococcemia with meningitis accompanied by gangrene of the extremities would be our guess) has received a new pair of legs.
Although scratching has been everyone’s favorite method of removing an itch for thousands if not millions of years, scientists have not been able to uncover the neurological mechanism of this action. Now a team of University of Minnesota researchers used the long-tailed macaques as subjects in an experiment that showed that the nerves being scratched send different signals to the spinal cord and then to the brain depending on whether there’s an itch in the area. In addition to being a peculiar finding, this may lead to the development of stimulation devices that address acute itching, pain, or other nociceptive phenomena.
archive of prints and photos from the Civil War to Vietnam. The head archivist of the museum now started a project to make the collection available to the general public through Flickr. The initial set so far contains about 800 images, but thousands more should be coming soon.
