Yesterday I was in The Cholera Hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh; today I’m reading about a highly emotional debate about the causes and treatment of cholera that took place in India in the 1857, during the Indian Mutiny. Both experiences have taught me something, and you might learn something as well. Cholera today Cholera is endemic […]
We are living in a perfect storm: vast amounts of data and rapidly increasing, cheap computing power. The world is shifting towards basing decisions even more on data. I believe, to paraphrase Billy Bosworth, that “10 years from now when we look back at how this era of big data evolved . . . we […]
The Indo-European root UER was not the only one that connoted twisting and turning. Others were PLEK, STREB, TERQ or TORQ, TERK, and UEI. Let’s start with PLEK, which in Greek gave πλεκ- and πλο(κ)-, in Latin plec- and plic-. It implied not only to twist, but other twisty actions as well—to braid or weave, […]
Having recently posted some thoughts on the continuing centrality of diagnosis in doctoring, I was happy to see the recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) report “Improving Diagnosis in Healthcare.” I especially appreciated the IOM’s clear statement that “Improving the diagnostic process . . . represents a moral, professional, and public health imperative.” The IOM describes […]
I remember my first data extraction. As a clinician I enjoyed creating good clinical notes, and was adept at digesting fat files of written scrawl, laboratory records, and referral letters—for complex or very ill patients, they often came in falling apart volumes stacked inches high. How then was I meant to scan them for a […]
The Closer We Get shows the last months of a woman’s life after she has had a stroke and tells the complex story of a family as they gather around the mother. It’s an intense film that held my attention for every one of its 87 minutes, much more so than The Lobster and Suffragette, […]
I’ve only recently begun tweeting, but have already been struck by the challenge of sometimes trying to convey complex ideas in 144 characters or less. The combinations of abbreviations, “hashtags,” and “@’s” can add complexity, but also confusion—the challenge is how to get the right balance of complexity, yet clarity. Writing the “perfect tweet” is […]
Although we don’t nowadays call bile gall, we still call the sac in which it is stored the gallbladder. “Bladder” is one of the early medical words listed in the Epinal glossary, in which “uessica” (classical Latin uesica, a bladder, blister, cyst, or vesicle) was glossed as “bledrae”. The relevant Indo-European root was BEU, BHEL, […]
In a departure from my usual interview format, today I am sharing a conversation with Ollie Smith, Director of Strategy and Innovation at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity. The charity describes itself as an innovation catalyst and recently put out an invitation to tender looking for organisations to help them test the hypothesis that a […]
The only thing certain in life is change. So the sooner we’re able to tackle dealing with change the better. I’m naturally an optimist as a rule, but the fortunes of the NHS over the immediate and long term future are enough to test even the sunniest of perspectives. I marvel at managers faced with […]