Humans have invented tools to solve problems for themselves since day one. We need to bang something into the ground. That rock over there will work. We need to communicate with one another over a distance. Hey, how about some smoke signals?
The social web is just another tool to solve our communication problems in addition to smoke signals and the telephone. It’s absolutely wonderful at spreading new ideas, new being ...
Read more...
As doctors, we have pills to treat infections and high cholesterol. We have scalpels to replace hips and open clogged arteries. But beyond pills and scalpels, what tools do we have? Walking out of the doctor’s office without a prescription is a rare occurrence these days. And the famous surgeon tagline has always been “a chance to cut is a chance to cure.” We see people when they’re sick and ...
Read more...
Upon finishing my second residency at Hopkins in Baltimore in September of 2007, I moved back to Williamsburg to start a new kind of practice:
Do you spend 8 hours in front of a screen at work? Do you then spend your free time watching TV or poking around the internet when you get home? How much time are you spending cooking healthy meals to eat with friends and family? How much time are you doing physical activities that make you happy?
A recent study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology entitled, Screen-Based ...
Read more...
I received my Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins in 2006. I took a course on transportation safety where we focused on designing roads for safety, making airlines safer, and decreasing the risk of medical helicopter crashes.
In 2007, I worked for Public Citizen, Ralph Nader’s consumer advocacy group. Ralph’s book, Unsafe at Any Speed, forced the automobile industry to focus on converting their cars from steel death ...
Read more...
Are reblogs encouraging suicides in the gay community?
Recently, we’ve seen numerous young gay people take their lives. Tumblr went purple and spread the word with 29,294 reblogs. The photo above has 17,300 reblogs. Obama even made an "It gets better" video with 704,000 views.
Is the blogosphere contributing and encouraging this recent suicide epidemic? Are we reblogging the stories of these “martyrs” without actually thinking about what we’re doing in ...
Read more...
The Futurama exhibit from the 1939 World’s Fair, although pretty in exhibition form, looks like a terrible place to live. It’s a world of machines, concrete, and efficiency. How boring! Futurists have always imagined the “what can we do?” scenarios. They’ve never really asked the questions:
Almost every Sunday night, I walk to this one restaurant in my neighborhood for some comfort food (we’re creatures of habit aren’t we?).
I pass a church on my way where an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting is held almost every night. As I walk through the crowd of smokers, I look at them and they look at me. They don’t know that I know they’re recovering addicts. And they put a smile ...
Read more...
Dr. Marcus Conant, among the first AIDS specialists in San Francisco, who for decades had one of the world’s largest private practices for patients with AIDS and HIV, has left town and moved to Manhattan. He has been a physician for nearly 50 years, but like many doctors, in the past decade he has become increasingly frustrated with insurance challenges that made running a private practice unnecessarily complicated and a financial ...
Read more...
If we really want to find out how to damn near perfectly manage any medical problem as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, we should be studying how doctors manage the medical problems of the cash-paying doctors they see in their own practice.
Read part one here.
My visit with Dr. Grubman was fairly simple. We discussed allergy shots and how they could possibly help significantly with my dust allergy. Since ...
Read more...
"A comprehensive and extremely useful roadmap for doctors."
-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
Learn More...
Past 6 Months
What I’ve learned from saving physicians from suicide
Pamela Wible, MD | PhysicianDear lawmakers: This is what it’s like to be a doctor today
Matthew Moeller, MD | PhysicianIf I’m wrong about guns, can you please explain why?
Claire McCarthy, MD | PhysicianIs Chris Christie too obese to run for president?
Jeffrey Parks, MD | PhysicianPrimary care doctors may no longer be needed
Doug Olson, MD | PhysicianWalgreens moves into primary care, and it’s our own damn fault
Kevin Pho, MD | Kevin's Take