TED Talk: Daniel Kraft: Medicine of the future?
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Category Archives: Health & Medicine
Hospital room of the future?
According to this post at Fast Company, this might be as close at 10 years away. I don’t want to spendy any time in the hosptial but this would make the stay less awful.
“The room is constructed as a plug-and-play environment in which customizable, prefabricated components integrate all aspects of care. The Patient Ribbon, for example, is a digital, silent, flat screen headboard that captures vital signs, houses gases, and holds the controls for all forms of lighting in the room. Ruthven says it’s possible that it will be the first component to be integrated in existing hospitals in the next five years. A media center at the foot of the bed facilitates collaboration between caregivers, patients, and visitors, and provides connections to multimedia entertainment and hospital information.
While most of the medical care is conducted within the patient room, several key functions for patients, staff, and visitors occur at the entry to the space. Namely, the Staff Resource Station features sliding doors made from smart glass technology and includes digital alerts for patient allergies, food restrictions, or special conditions.”
I’m guessing health care will be really good or really bad. Probably both, depending how wealthy/poor you are.
Carnivores Anonymous
It’s been almost a week since I ate meat. No, I am not going Vegan or vegetarian. I like meat. Barb’s delicious pulled pork; her smoked chicken wings; a Sonic Burger; even the occasional baloney sandwich. I grew up eating meat. And probably will again. This is just a little experiment. It’s a terrible analogy, but I’m reminded of recovering alcoholics who stay sober one day at a time.
As meal time approaches, I decide if there is any alternative to meat that sounds appetizing. And, for the past week, there has been. I’m not sure what has brought this on or how long it will last but it has been easier than I would have thought.
I don’t think I have any strong moral concerns regarding eating meat. On the other hand, if I had to kill the cow or the chicken, I’d pass.
I should confess I don’t have a real “love” for food the way some do. It’s just fuel for my engine and pretty much any fuel will do.
Not sure where I stand on leather shoes.
Memory is fiction
A recurring theme in some of my recent reading has been the nature of subjective time. Among other insights, that the past and the future are delusions, created by the mind. This is a little easier to grasp for the future. Any ideas we have about what is going to happen is clearly fiction. But the past feels more “real.” It happened. I remember it. But that’s fiction as well.
“A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. The larger moral of the experiment is that memory is a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. It shows us that every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, or reconsolidated.” — The Frontal Cortex
This reminds me of the scene in Blade Runner when Rachel discovers her memories are implanted. A disturbing thought because (for most of us) we ARE our memories.
But if that’s not really so, if our memories are fiction, who are we? Probably not who we think.
Alzheimer’s Android app
It was almost 2 years ago that I imagined an app (I was thinking iPhone) that could help sufferers (and their families) of Alzheimer’s Disease. The post generated a fair number of comments, the most recent of which points to info about an Android app that does some of the things I suggested in that first post.
Data Visualization: Relationship between health and wealth
Thanks to my pal Jamie for sharing this amazing 5 min video showing the relationship between health and wealth over the last 200 years. This gives me hope.
iPads just what the doctor ordered
That clipboard your doctor used to carry around is getting replaced by the iPad. From the Chicago Sun-Times:
“Emergency room doctors are using iPads to order lab tests and medication. Plastic surgeons are using them to show patients what they might look like after surgery. And medical residents are using them as a quick reference to look up drug interactions and medical conditions.
Since Apple’s iPad hit the market in April, doctors at Chicago area hospitals are increasingly using the hot-selling tablet as a clinical tool.
Not only does the iPad allow doctors to view electronic medical records, wherever they are, it also gives them a way to show patients their X-rays, EKGs and other lab tests on an easy-to-read screen. Plus, it’s lighter and has a longer battery life than many laptops, making it convenient for doctors to take on rounds.
Within the next month, the University of Chicago Medical Center plans to provide iPads to all of its internal medicine residents, expanding on a pilot program launched earlier this year. Similarly, Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood has given iPads to all of its orthopedic residents as part of a pilot program.
Other doctors are buying their own iPads and using them to interact with patients. At U. of C., for instance, plastic surgeon Dr. Julie Park uses her iPad to show breast-cancer patients what they might look like after reconstructive surgery.
Another hospital that has embraced the iPad is MetroSouth Medical Center in Blue Island. Once doctors there learned that they could access the hospital’s electronic medical records with the iPad, “it went through here like wildfire,” said Dr. Richard Watson, an emergency room physician at MetroSouth. “At least half of our staff here in the emergency room has their own iPad and carries it and uses it.”
Though the iPad provides a portal to the hospital’s electronic record, patient information isn’t actually stored on the device. And both the iPad and the hospital server are password-protected, lowering the chances that sensitive data could be swiped from a lost or stolen iPad.
Dr. Eric Nussbaum, MetroSouth’s emergency room chief, said the iPad also solves one of the problems created by switching from a paper-based record system to an electronic one: having to go to a desktop computer to order lab tests or type in notes on a patient.
“With this, I’m back to the convenience of being in the patient’s room, talking to them and plugging in my orders right then and there,” he said.
If you’ve spotted the iPad in the medical wild, let us know in the comments.
New studies on effects of psychedelics
“…the brain is like a TV set that is “hardwired” into the single “channel” of everyday physical reality — Rick Strassman calls it “channel normal.” What psychedelics may do when used and administered properly is “retune the receiver wavelength of the brain,” thus providing us with regular, repeated, reliable access to other levels of reality that surround us at all times but are not normally accessible to our senses. It is even possible that these long-reviled drugs open a secret doorway inside our own minds allowing us to approach the Holy Grail of quantum physics — freestanding parallel universes and the intelligent beings who inhabit them. If that is so then the ability of psilocybin to release terminal cancer patients from their fear of death through “an abrupt change of consciousness” makes perfect sense — for they would know from direct experience that even when the television set is broken the television signal keeps right on broadcasting.”
This is why I blog
In March of of 2009 I posted an idea for an iPhone app for people who suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease. It continues to get comments, the most recent from a researcher in Australia New Zealand:
“I like your ideas! I am leading a small team of researchers that are in the process of examining uses of mobile computing technology in neurorehabilitation, including developing custom software for the iPhone. Our initial work is in traumatic brain injury, but it is likely that much of the work would be applicable to people with dementia, including Alzheimer’s Disease. That’s an area I’ve worked in previously, so will certainly be interested to extend the research into that area in the future as well. Thought you might be interested to know a little of what we’re up to.”
It would be fun to know that one of my ideas made it into an app that helped those dealing with this disease. If you or someone you know are using smart phones to “compensate for cognitive difficulties,” get in touch with Dr. Babbage.
Assuming Dr. Babbage found my post via a Google, I searched “Alzheimer’s Disease iPhone App” and it was number one result of 424,000. Twitter, Facebook, etc are all fun and/or useful but blogging is the only way I know to reach so many different people.
Rewiring with meditation
“Spending some time meditating may improve the integrity and efficiency of certain connections in the brain, according to a new study. When a group of participants meditated regularly over the course of a month, brain scans showed increased nerve connections in the areas that govern reward processing and decision making. The authors of the study hope this particular kind of meditation can be adapted to help those conditions with manifestations in the same area of the brain, such as ADD, addiction, and dementia.”