I've just updated the IN3 think piece Age & IT Experience that plots the current age of managers, employees and customers against the big developments in information technology. It's a good party starter: find your age when the IBM PC was launched, when streaming media happened, when Google Maps came out.
What are the milestones that define generations in healthcare? The dawn of managed care, the Clinton initiative, PET scans, robotic surgery, Health 2.0?
Health Memes Week At A Glance for March 9-12, 2009
Question of the Week:
Plus various perspectives on embryonic stem cells.
The river of daily Health Memes contains many keepers, so I've started a section of permanent links that will grow to extra pages as the content develops. Here's the first batch. (Suggestions are welcome.)
A 21st Century Plague? The Syndrome of Inappropriate Over-Confidence in Computing
Healthcare Renewal
A timely rant on rotten studies, clueless simulations, IT arrogance and the "cyber-industrial complex."
Consumer-Driven Healthcare
Dr. Wes
"What a crock of excrement."
Next Steps for Progressive Stem Cell Politics Center for Genetics & Society
Are We Finally Entering the Golden Age of Healthcare Transparency?
Wachter's World
A little sunshine goes a long way.
The impact of gene patents on the future of personal genomics
Genetic Future
Important topic: Companies own patents on
specific genes for specific diseases. Good comment thread. "It's like
patenting the stars."
My Genome, My Self
NY Times Magazine
Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker's excellent review of the possibilities and limitations of consumer genetics.
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
PLoS Med
"It ain’t what we don’t know that hurts us. It’s what we know that ain’t so.” -- not Mark Twain
We don't cover politics at daily Health Memes. Outside of an occasional opinion from policy stars like Maggie Maher or Ezra Klein, most of the posts track the revolution of rising patient expectations, the big gaps between reality and popular medical wisdom, and the brilliant new science and technology innovations derived from the NBIC convergence. That's a broad beat.
Regenerative medicine approaches a tipping point.
After a decade of gathering promise -- and some touches of outright fraud -- regenerative medicine is unleashing the power of human cells to grow into the tissues we need. Scientists working on animal models have been getting closer. A Medgadget post told of a Stem Cell Grown Into Prostate and PhysOrg.com reported how Scientists succeed through stem cell therapy in reversing brain birth defects.
This month, the U.S. FDA approved the first trials of human embryonic stem cell therapy in humans by Geron Corp. On Monday, we read How the Geron Stem Cell Treatment is Supposed to Work from the WSJ Health Blog. Next Monday a meme from Science Daily will show how a Stem Cell Transplant Reverses Early-stage Multiple Sclerosis using a technique similar to those used to treat leukemia and myeloma.
It's only been about 10 years since the first human embryonic stem cell lines were derived. (It's been 16 years since the last big U.S. healthcare reform plan.)
There's a growing body of memes about misusing genetic testing for non-therapeutic ends. This week, Eye on DNA interviewed Dr. Tzung-Fu Hsieh of RedTracer DNA Test for the Red Hair Gene, MC1R who implied that having red hair could lead to discrimination and skin cancer. Like last week's story about the baby girl tested for breast cancer predispositon before conception, testing the unborn is always supposed to be for their own good -- except for the unspoken punchline that if they fail the test they stay unborn.
As a species, humans are too selfish and too stupid to think these things through. The priceless Neuroskeptic dissects the hubbub over a recent pre-natal study in yesterday's meme Autism, Testosterone and Eugenics.
Wednesday a Technology Review story described The Glucose-Monitoring Tattoo, a nanosensor injected into the skin that fluoresces in infrared light when it detects blood sugar. If the technique gets applied to humans, diabetics won't need to stick themselves for blood samples, they'll just check the glow of their tatts. According to researchers, other nanosensors could check for chemicals like sodium or calcium. (or maybe alcohol? THC? serotonin?) Someday, we may wear our bio-status on our foreheads.
Two months ago, I began the daily Health Memes coverage on this site, and I've been immersed in scores of great journals, blogs and news sources from scores of different perspectives. In an effort to wrestle some meaning out of all that content, I'll post a weekend review examining the big themes against our NBIC template.
THIS WEEK'S REDUCTIO
We don't know anything, really.
Marcia Angell's essay in the January 15 New York Review of Books, Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption, outlines the crooked dance of clinical trials in which medical schools, researchers and Big Pharma select the most profitable results. Susan Dentzer's' commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine decries the Pitfalls of Health Care Journalism in which ignorance, sloth and linkbaiting produce shoddy and even harmful news coverage. Much worse, David Gorski unveils active pseudoscience in his Science-Based Medicine post Chopra and Weil and Roy, Oh My! Or: The Wall Street Journal, coopted. In the policy arena, audacious hopefuls get a dose of reality from The Health Care Blog as Robert Laszewski pours cold water on The Five Myths of Healthcare Reform.
It's hard to live the evidence-based life.
BIOTECHNOLOGY
The first annual Consumer Genetics Show debuts in Boston this summer. Psychologist Stephen Pinker's New York Times Magazine cover story My Genome, My Self brilliantly describes the possibilities of personal genomics and discusses its limitations for individual health. Medical News Today tells of the First Baby Tested For BRCA1 Before Conception Born In UK but not about her brothers and sisters who failed that first test. And the Center for Genetics and Society brought us the Mercury News story It's a boy! Asian immigrants use medical technology to satisfy age-old desire: a son.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Tim Gee in Medical Connectivity offers an outstanding analysis of how Medical Device Networks Trouble Industry as open architectures, commodity hardware and consumer electronics intrude upon regulated, proprietary, embedded legacy apps. Reality similarly intrudes in Scott Shreeve's Crossover Healthcare essay The Problem with VistA: “Its the Platform, Stupid” and the good comment thread about the VA's pioneering electronic medical record.
Evidence-based reality comes up against the World Wide Web's "wisdom of the crowd" in a thoughtful post on Laika's MedLibLog The Web 2.0-EBM Medicine split. [1] Introduction into a short series. Bob Doherty at The ACP Advocate Blog asks Do patients really want to see their doctor's report card? The disruptive Scott Shreeve of Crossover Healthcare suggests putting some sunlight into insurers' Explanations of Benefits with a call to a Transparency Trek: The Million EOB March. And KevinMD.com tells of a little too much transparency in A vasectomy, live on Twitter.
NANOTECHNOLOGY
Last month, Nature Nanotechnology published a study from Yale which was released in Medical News Today with the headline Nanotech Culture Wars Possible. A PhysOrg.com story worries about Nanotech in your vitamins, and the gap between nano-reality and visions of self-replicating molecular machines prompts Biopinionated Nils Reinton to ask Anybody Seen a Nanobot Lately?
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
Zack Lynch in Brain Waves describes a conference on the Decade of the Mind, and Shannon Proudfoot in the Calgary Herald declares "Brain gyms" a new industry. The World of Psychology reports Tetris Inoculation Against PTSD Flashbacks.
Returning to this week's reductio, in The Chart Is Dead, Long Live The Chart, The Last Psychiatrist describes how patient records (which all the revolutionaries want to digitize) are "unreliable, misleading and worse than useless" because of politics, financial interest and fear of litigation. Paraphrasing Ted Nelson, "If the chart is not shaped by the doctoring, the doctoring will be shaped by the chart."
See all the week's Health Memes for January 12-15 and January 19-22.
Many of the great healthcare thinkers and bloggers wrapped up 2008 with end-of-year considerations of the important developments in their fields, and some looked ahead with predictions for 2009. Here are the January 1, 2009 Health Memes from around the web:
Personal Genomics in 2008: the Year in Review Genetic Future
Finding Venture Capital In 2009 Will Be Tough Pharmalot
2009 Stem Cell Trendsetters in Neurology and Psychiatry Brain Waves
The Future of Pharma Health Beat
The Year in Bioethics: The Highs and Lows of 2008
Bioethics Forum
2008 in Review: Ethnicity Strikes Back Dienekes' Anthropology Blog
HIT Predictions for 2009 on iHealthBeat
Health Populi
Best of Nanomedicine in 2008 Nanomedicinecenter.com
2009: Predictions Across the Web
ReadWriteWeb
Social Media Trends 2009, TrendsSpotting ReadWriteWeb
Top 30 Brain Health and Fitness Articles of 2008 SharpBrains
Top 10 In 2008 Health Affairs Blog
Not Exactly Rocket Science Review of 2008 [Not Exactly Rocket Science] ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science
Top Health Search Engines of 2008 [Highlight HEALTH] The Highlight HEALTH Network
The Year in Biomedicine Technology Review Feed - Biomedicine Top Stories
Health and Health Care in 2009 -- a Year of Managing Risks and Wild Cards The Health Care Blog
(See the final week of 2008 on the December 29 archive page.)
I review over 80 healthcare blogs, news sites and research sources for the daily Health Memes postings. We've set up a Google Custom Search that's limited to only those sites, now listed on the Health Memes Source Sites page.
Are there any sources of disruptive healthcare innovation that should be added to the list?
Monday marks the soft launch of HealthcareNBIC's HealthMemes, a review of web conversations about disruptive innovations in healthcare. In our seminar and conference work, I've been trying to communicate the broad range of disciplines that are reforming healthcare from all the related disciplines of NBIC, nano-, bio-, info and cognitive sciences.
Check it out HealthMemes at IN3.ORG/health and tell me what you think. -- Jack Powers
On the face of it, Google Health released this month in beta is just another personal medical record system similar to a hundred others including Microsoft's HealthVault. But Google has designed a specifically open health record: providers, payers and all kinds of service companies can use the published Application Programmer Interface to link their data to your Google health file.
Since Google is not a healthcare provider, the privacy restrictions of HIPPA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 don't apply. Health IT security guru Fred Trotter describes why this is a good thing, and we went brainstorming to see how open architecture might affect wellness, sex, eldercare, insurance and other health concerns.
Read Google Health 2018: Best Case Scenarios.
Read Google Health 2018: Worst Case Scenarios.
The glass is half-full or half-empty. Add your comments below, and or a different comment perspective, see the thread on these articles at Slashdot.
Recent Comments