I’ve been too swamped with the day to day realities of teaching, patient care, and just plain real life lately to be very reflective, but Zackary Berger and Dave deBronkart finally spurred me on to put fingers to keyboard, and put words to my thoughts on the nascent move towards “precision medicine.” From the first, when […]
Category: US healthcare
Zackary Berger and Dave deBronkart: “Precision medicine” needs patient partnership
US President Obama recently presented the outlines of a US$215 million plan for “precision medicine” through support of research funded by the National Institutes of Health and National Cancer Institute. Presented as “healthcare tailored to you,” it would take into account “individual differences in people’s genes, microbiomes, environments, and lifestyles—making possible more effective, targeted treatments […]
James McCormack and Mike Allan: Simply making evidence simple
This blog is part of a series of blogs linked with BMJ Clinical Evidence, a database of systematic overviews of the best available evidence on the effectiveness of commonly used interventions. In an ideal world in which shared decision making is practised with impunity, healthcare providers need—at their fingertips—an appreciation and understanding of (as well […]
Elizabeth Loder: Has the American Board of Internal Medicine lost its way?
Elizabeth Loder examines the emergence of organized US physician opposition to revalidation requirements. Something remarkable is happening right now in American medicine. A unified physician movement has emerged that cuts across the varied interests of different specialties to focus on a specific cause of dissatisfaction. It has already forced concessions from one powerful organization, and […]
Carolyn Thomas: Yet another cardiac risk calculator?
To see for myself how reliable the new NHS heart disease risk calculator is, I completed all required fields exactly as I would have answered seven years ago. That was just before I survived what physicians still call “the widowmaker heart attack,” caused by a fully occluded left anterior descending coronary artery. (By the way, […]
Alvin Chan: Chances are, you’re not sensitive to gluten
In the medical community, there are certain conditions that fall under the fuzzy category of medically unexplained syndromes (MUS). These syndromes, like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and somatoform disorder, present with odd constellations of symptoms that neither physical examination nor diagnostic tests can explain. [1] To some members of the medical community, these are not diseases in their own […]
Tessa Richards: Big data—jam tomorrow
Rest easy in your beds overworked doctors and ailing patients, for tomorrow, all will be well. Big data will revolutionise healthcare. Processes in creaky health systems will be streamlined, patients empowered, and outcomes improved. Upbeat messages permeated the air at the UK e-health meeting at Olympia in London this week (ukehealthweek.com). E-health is more a […]
Saurabh Jha: War on Death
Thomas Hobbes described life as pitifully “nasty, brutish, and short.” Thanks to the free market and the state, life is no longer a Hobbesian nightmare. But death has become nasty, brutish, and long. Surgeon and writer, Atul Gawande, explores the medicalization of ageing and death in Being Mortal. Gawande points to a glaring deficiency in […]
William Cayley: What are the (hidden) costs?
“The economics of education are changed dramatically by delivering online courses to large numbers, making expensive education much cheaper.” That line in Richard Smith’s blog post describing a proposed “global university” for healthcare workers caught my attention—especially since my own local statewide university system, of which I am an employee as a medical school faculty […]
The BMJ Today: Childhood drowning outcomes—prevention is key
My Facebook feed was filled with complaints after the National Football League’s Superbowl broadcast last week. The target? A commercial from an insurer highlighting the importance of preventing childhood accidents. While commenters seemed to acknowledge the importance of the topic, they felt that the message was too dark for an event that is otherwise generally […]