Society for Participatory Medicine
e-patients.net blog
New York Times
policy issues, reforming hc, Why PM
“Design and create a safe, decent, patient centered healthcare system.”
Yesterday the New York Times reported that some health insurers have applied to regulatory agencies to push premiums sharply higher - usually double-digit increases, while citizens are suffering. This falls on top of the 11 year history reported last year by the Kaiser Family Foundation: wages and inflation are up ~40%, while health costs and worker [...]
Read Morefound on the net, general
Just Say “Know” to Drugs: A Proposal to Improve Prescription Drug Information
Have you followed the long and painful efforts to improve the information prescription drug manufacturers are required to provide us? Really, given that almost half of us in the US take at least one prescription medication daily, you’d think this would be a high priority among all those public and private agencies and companies who [...]
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Living N=1
If you haven’t listened to the Patient Voices series on The New York Times site, let me be the first to recommend it. I spend quite a bit of time writing up survey data, working with moderately large respondent pools (N=2,253 is the number of people who completed my last health survey; N=609 is the [...]
Read Morenews & gossip, pt/doc co-care, trends & principles, Why PM
PeoplesPharmacy.com in NYTimes: “Not All Drugs Are the Same After All”
We’re thrilled to see our Joe and Terry Graedon, of PeoplesPharmacy.com, in the New York Times (“Not All Drugs Are the Same After All”) telling a truth that the FDA hasn’t figured out: generics don’t always work the same as the brand name drug. Joe and Terry exemplify the participatory medicine movement. He’s a pharmacologist, and she’s a PhD [...]
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Social Healthcare: “Medicine in the Age of Twitter”
Physician Pauline Chen writes about “Medicine in the Age of Twitter” for the New York Times. The article suggests the need for our upcoming peer-reviewed Journal of Participatory Medicine: …a quick scan through peer-reviewed journals reveals only a handful of articles, and no evidence-based guidelines, to guide doctors on the use of social media. It [...]
Read Morenews & gossip, understanding statistics
Cyberchondria: Old Wine in New Bottles
Just before Thanksgiving, Microsoft released a study entitled, “Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search.” Ryen White and Eric Horvitz took advantage of a data set that few people have access to (log files from Microsoft’s Live Search engine and MSN Health and Fitness) as well as a survey of 515 [...]
Read Moree-patient stories, hc's problem list
All MRIs Are Not Created Equal
Gina Kolata’s must-read article, “The Scan That Didn’t Scan,” in last week’s Science Times points out vast differences in the quality of MRIs as well as vast differences in the expertise of the radiologists who interpret them. Patients need to understand this, because physicians sure as Hades aren’t going to tell you. Kolata uses sports [...]
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