Category Archives: Neurology

Video: "You can never Trust Doctors", linked by one of my Facebook friends.

I'm sure some patients and doctors will not find this Eurosport commercial funny, and they probably have a point. Humor may be difficult to explain and interpret. Some social media "experts" even advise doctors not to use humor on Twitter, Facebook and blogs for fear of misinterpretation and legal repercussions.

Comments from Twitter:

@scanman: Ha!! I do this ALL THE TIME!!!

From the NYTimes:

Prof. Mueller almost immediately noticed a previously hidden cluster in, of all things, pole-vaulting. Several high school and college athletes each year were killed or paralyzed simply by missing the pit with the pole, falling on their heads off the landing pad, or sliding down the pole and hitting their heads on hard surfaces. Pits were soon expanded and surrounded with softer padding.

Mueller detected a strange number of paralytic accidents in organized swimming, all from relay-type dives into water that was too shallow — resulting in today’s minimum depths.

Concussion Recovery - Mayo Clinic Video

References:
Professor Tracks Ghastly Injuries in Hope of Prevention - NYTimes.com.

BMJ: Sleep apnoea (apnea, in its American spelling) is a condition that causes a patient to stop breathing for short periods during their sleep. In this video researchers Joaquín Durán-Cantolla and Jose María Montserrat discuss their work into the use of CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) to treat the condition.

Clinical medicine is disappearing fast as topic for blog posts

Something happened to medical blogs in the past 6-12 months. They now seem a lot less interesting, more industrialized and aggregated. They have also become "too safe", generic and detached for regular reading.

There seems to be a rise of group blogs, guest posts and semi-syndicated contents. Several "clinic-focused" health bloggers have retired due to a variety of professional and HIPAA-related concerns.

It looks like clinical medicine is disappearing fast as a topic for blog posts in the U.S., replaced by posts about social media itself. As a side note, "social media" is actually a plural noun (media vs. medium), but it seems to be used mostly in singular form nowadays.

The central part of medicine is patients - don't push them out of social media

The central part of medicine is patients. Yet, we tell doctors: "never, ever blog about patients". This somewhat misguided advice displaces the most important part of the equation - the patients themselves.

Some health bloggers claim that we have to "aim above HIPAA" to avoid privacy breaches and comply with the highest standard of professionalism required by our occupation as physicians. How high "above HIPAA" is good enough though? In most clinical scenarios, the compliance with omitting the 18 unique HIPAA identifiers strikes the right balance.

The University of Tromsø in Norway - the world's northernmost university - has adopted new recommendations designed to increase the number of female full professors from the current 23% to 30% by 2014.

Women spend longer as Associate Professors than men, partly because “men apply as soon as they think they have a chance of promotion, while women tend to wait until they are very confident”.

The panel developed 13 recommendations, among them:

- re-advertising positions if there are no women in the applicant pool
- ensuring that women receive training in salary negotiation
- assessing research quality rather than quantity
- improving the visibility of women within institutions
- encouraging diversity in leadership style

Adult or Child Laptop Use at Home, Work or Classroom.

Mobile or Smart Phone Use while Driving, Traveling or on the Move.

Link via Digital Inspiration.