For me, maybe you too, the best part about science is how it disrupts the status quo. A belief, a way of doing something, a paradigm if you will, becomes entrenched. Humans love patterns. We get attached. I call this the way-it’s-always-been-done philosophy. It’s endemic in medicine, and, from what I can see, in education […]
Category: Knowledge
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Learning what not to do…
Ali Almossawi is a young metrics engineer at Mozilla. He collaborates with the MIT media lab. He has done something quite remarkable, uplifting and useful. (And isn’t that a good thing these days.) He wrote a book called An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. More than 500,000 people read the online version. Now there is […]
…one could be pessimistic. PBS NewsHour did this story last night. Adjunct professors, many of them with doctorates, are struggling to make a living. A French literature professor uses food stamps. An English professor just up and quit. This video got me thinking about the word “value.” The MacBook delivered this as the first definition: […]
If you had to write a one page memo to a Senator/Representative detailing the one thing they could do to improve US healthcare, what would it be? For me, it’s improving the wastefulness of our system. Here is my attempt at a memo: Comparative Effectiveness Research is a win-win: Knowledge always is. US healthcare is […]
Hey everyone… Welcome to 2014. I’m back from holiday. I like to say ‘holiday’ rather than ‘vacation.’ It sounds more Euro. Plus, if one truly seeks word precision, saying holiday when describing time in Key West works. Everything about that place is celebratory and festive. Let’s talk about reading and writing. First, I’m not going […]
I made a discovery this week about the novel anticoagulant medications, dabigatran (Pradaxa), rivaroxaban (Xarelto), apixaban (Eliquis) and edoxaban (Lixiana). I was looking into the often-asked question of how these new drugs compare to the old standard, warfarin. The discovery felt like a Eureka moment. I ran it by my stats guy–my son–and a couple […]
“We should be as demanding of ourselves as we are of those who challenge us.” Dr. Jerome Groopman, writing in the New Rupublic Writing about the medical decision-making surrounding vaccines proved to be sketchy. Yesterday’s post brought stinging criticism from both sides of the debate. A pediatrician felt the structure of the post was patronizing. […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about vaccines. As a learner, an observer of humans and our nature, a worshiper of the scientific method, a doctor, a new grandfather, and a member of society, few debates could be more compelling. The kerfuffle over vaccines has it all. It’s the Lance Armstrong story on steroids. (Grin.) The […]
Let’s be honest: If you are bold enough to hit the ‘publish’ button, it’s normal to care what readers think. I write about Medicine; I like doctors; I respect doctors. So it matters how colleagues react to my words. I was both proud and concerned when the Greater Louisville Medical Society decided to republish my […]
Perhaps writing about health matters from the perspective of a cardiologist/bike racer is a little like parenting: At times the message seems less than compassionate, even though it’s born out of concern for others, knowledge and a tincture of middle-age experience. The many excellent comments on my recent telomere/heart-health post stirred me to write a […]
I’ve said it before here many times over. In achieving quality of medical care, information and transparency are fundamental. Knowledge empowers patients to share in their medical decisions. Doctors have always been teachers, but with the explosion of medical treatment options, this role has never been more important. Currently, in most of the real world, […]