FuN LivINg Lifestyle

Dean Kamen discusses one of the first brain-controlled prostheses in the history of robotics. Possessing fine motor skills in addition to strength, Kamen’s arm is capable of picking up a raisin without dropping it.

Fascinating lecture from TEDMED 2009.

• Smartphones and the future of wireless medicine
• How did David Blaine break the world record for holding his breath?
• Is a new strategy needed in the war against cancer?

No comment | Tags: Patient | Category: Patient care

by John Gever

With growing pressures on hospitals from the new healthcare reform law and from the stakeholder community to become more efficient and effective, administrators may find they already have the necessary expertise under their own roofs, a prominent hospitalist said.

“Some organizations with hospitalist programs need look no further than these programs to chart a course toward more effective physician-hospital integration,” wrote Robert M. Wachter, MD, of the University of California San Francisco.

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Read the rest of Healthcare reform and the new role of hospitalists

No comment | Tags: Health reform, Hospital, Hospitalist | Category: Hospital

by William R. Yates, MD

Health care reform continues to be a key political topic of discussion in the U.S. Physician supply and specialty training are important elements in designing an efficient system that provides the highest quality of care.

To understand where U.S. physician supply and specialty training is headed, I examined the U.S. trends from 1990 to 2007 (latest year data is available).

Physician supply has been growing during this period. In 1990, there were 615,000 physicians in the U.S. and by 2007 this figure had increased by 53% to 941,000. This came during a period when the total U.S. population increased approximately 25%

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Read the rest of Physician supply trends for primary care doctors and specialists

2 comments | Tags: Health reform, Primary care, Specialist | Category: Health policy and politics

Should smokers receive screening CT scans?

As it stands, there’s no evidence that screening patients with either chest x-rays or CT scans save lives, but a large, federally-funded study should yield some answers in the next year or so.

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Read the rest of CT scans for lung cancer screening may not save lives

1 comment | Tags: Cancer, Primary care | Category: Cancer

by Steven Knope, MD

For the last several years, writers in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association have authored doomsday editorials about the prognosis of primary care medicine. There has been much discussion about the fact that internists and family practitioners cannot keep pace with rising overheads and falling reimbursement under the traditional third-party payment system.

Paraphrasing a recent story published in The New York Times, an internist in Massachusetts who practices under the new RomneyCare program said this: “Every time I see a Medicare patient, it is the equivalent of giving them a ten-dollar bill. I have a six month wait to see a new patient. I run from room-to-room. I can barely make my overhead. I’ve never felt so disrespected in my entire life.”

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Read the rest of Internal medicine is dead, will concierge physicians thrive?

21 comments | Tags: Health reform, Medicare, Primary care | Category: Physician practice

by StorytellERdoc, MD

The patient arrived in cardiac arrest. He had been brought to our emergency department in the middle of the night. Although he had a significant cardiac history, he was only in his late-forties. His transport from his house to our department had been less than ten minutes and, along the way, the pre-hospital team had done an excellent job of intubating this patient and establishing an IV.

His wife was with him. Less than fifteen short minutes before their arrival, her life had been altered forever when her husband had woken her, from a deep sleep, to complain that he had intense chest pain. Seconds after, she witnessed him become unresponsive.

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Read the rest of Cardiac arrest resuscitation, with wife as witness

6 comments | Tags: Emergency, Heart, Hospital | Category: Hospital

by Peggy Peck

First, my disclosure: I’ve written at least one news article about every major statin trial since 4-S, and I’ve been mightily impressed with almost all of the statin data. So, I was also impressed when the JUPITER results were reported about a year and a half ago — although I became a little less “impressed” as JUPITER continued to spew forth analysis after analysis almost monthly since then.

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Read the rest of Statins for heart disease prevention, is the luster fading?

4 comments | Tags: Drugs, Heart | Category: Drugs and pharma

Welcome to Steve Wallet, Architect, Blogger Tips and Tricks first guest blogger with his post on working with animated gif images, Blogger and Photoshop. As for me, I only use free software, namely Irfanview and PC Paint, so I hope Steve’s post will provide useful information which I am not able to provided for those who like graphic heavy posts or blogs:I saw Peter’s article about adding .gif’s