Dealing with the Growing Power of “Medical Googlers” | MedCity News

Dealing with the Growing Power of “Medical Googlers” | MedCity News

Dealing with the Growing Power of ’Medical Googlers’

November 7, 2012 4:39 pm by Ken Walz | 2 Comments MedCity News

The increased use of the internet by healthcare consumers has led to at least two types of medical conversations ironically illustrated by two different online features sharing a name: the ’DocTalk’ here, in which Arizona kidney specialists share treatment information on smartphones, and another ’DocTalk,’ where Ontario physician Stuart Foxman discusses such communications issues as the risks of physician’s giving too much information, and the growing irritation among physicians with patients who research conditions and treatments online.
Like it or not, these two ’doc talks’ are merging. While physicians and other providers are busily keeping up with changing practice parameters, medical literature and patient management (increasingly by computer, smartphone or tablet), patients are trying to keep up, too. WebMD receives more than 40 million hits a month, and anywhere from half to 80% of all Americans have used the internet to research a medical condition or symptoms. Even larger medical providers like Kaiser Permanente encourage the use of websites for gathering medical information. In addition, consumers increasingly have the ability to research and share opinions on their providers through sites like www.vitals.com. Interestingly, the ability of consumers to rate and offer opinions on providers is not growing quite as quickly as other industries, due to reasons we’ll cover in a future post.
If you talk to physicians, many are not thrilled with this new ’patient empowerment’ reality. Some physicians express frustration with patients coming into their offices apparently under the impression ’ often false ’ that they are as informed about their medical condition as their doctors. In addition, a new type of patient, the ’cyberchondriac,’ believes that his or her condition must be the worst one they read about online. This, of course, is not a new problem; even medical students are warned ’When you hear hoofbeats, don’t assume they’re zebras.’
What can physicians do, and how can digital healthcare innovation help them? It’s estimated that two thirds of patients now want doctors to recommend reliable websites to them. Doctors should be able to do more than that, and digital technology should help them:

• Use Google news alerts and other online tools to stay current with the same breaking information that will be read by patients’this will help keep up with consumers but also stay ahead of recent (say, announced that morning) FDA Drug Alerts and other developments.
• Find and recommend patient groups and discussion communities that benefit patients. There are thousands of such groups online, with tens of thousands of patients. Quick searches will result in better exchange of information and satisfied patients. More of this information can be searched and downloaded via smartphones and other digital technology.
• Encourage the use of reliable smartphone apps and online news bulletins, clinical research sites and university medical centers. By steering patients/consumers toward the better-designed and monitored sites, both sides benefit from sharing good information.

The internet has made sharing information easier, and caused empowered consumers to demand more from their doctors. This new world isn’t going away, and medical innovators might be well-served to work closely with doctors’no matter the resistance’to encourage the use of information that separates hoofbeats from zebras.
Do you think physician skepticism of online health information is justified? Or is the online power of consumers helping improve and personalize healthcare? How can technology help steer things in the right direction? Is your medical device or digital health company working on a solution? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Read more: http://medcitynews.com/2012/11/dealing-with-the-growing-power-of-medical-googlers/#ixzz2Bz3sf0wP

Kit Siang: Former PMs declared Malaysia a secular state - The Sun Daily

Kit Siang: Former PMs declared Malaysia a secular state - The Sun Daily:

The Malaysian Insider

Kit Siang: Former PMs declared Malaysia a secular state The Sun Daily KUALA LUMPUR (Oct 22, 2012): The country's first prime minister, the late Tunku Abdul Rahman, had openly declared that Malaysia is a secular state with Islam as its official religion, the Dewan was told today. "I can give documents and proof to show that the ... Parliament: Malaysia Has Never Been Endorsed Or Declared As Secular ...Bernama Nazri: Federal constitution does not explicitly say Malaysia is secularThe Star Online History contradicts minister's arguments that Malaysia is not secularThe Malaysian Insider Free Malaysia Today all 9 news articles »

malaysiakini: No Brave New Malaysia... by S Thayaparan

malaysiakini: No Brave New Malaysia... by S Thayaparan:

No Brave New Malaysia

S Thayaparan 7:53AM Oct 21, 2012

"Whatever we wish to achieve in the future, it must begin by knowing where we are in the present - not where we wish we were, or where we wish others to think we are, but where we are in fact." - Thomas Sowell (Economic Facts and Fallacies)

COMMENT The two most important lessons the long Umno watch has taught me. First, the federal government should not be entrusted to carry out policies based either on race or on need. The second, power should be decentralised.

Listening to the participants in the forum titled ‘Vision for Economic Development for Malaysia' organised by the Chevening Alumni of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur on Monday, what struck me was that there were no new ideas coming from either BN or Pakatan Rakyat.

PSM's Sungai Siput MP Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj (who, as the DAP's Tony Pua accurately pointed out, set the bar extremely high) laid out a persuasive argument for a needs-based approach as opposed to the racial card game which is at present in play.

Jeyakumar, the only participant who has been in the grassroots trenches and been witness to Umno at the height of its power and the new reality where Pakatan has gained more influence, is a credible advocate of his socialist position. It is pity that he does not get (unlike the other two participants) mainstream (read: alternative) press coverage for his cause which he rightly deserves.

He has put in the hard work, unlike the other two politicians there who no doubt serve different roles but were, at the end of the day, regurgitating (way past its expiry date) political party talking points.

Khairy Jamaluddin, who famously used the euphemism "leakages" to describe the corruption endemic in the New Economic Policy (NEP), continued his disingenuous sermonising by conceding that a needs-based approach was acceptable, but Malaysians should consider the "grey areas" that did not involve those "bumiputera entrepreneurs who were not on the margins of society".

Khairy may justify it as "empowerment of certain ethnic groups within certain economic sectors..." but for most informed Malaysians it most definitely means a policy of crony capitalism. All this comes at a time when Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah is taking potshots at the"privatisation of power", which was never really about privatisation but rather about extending and legitimising Umno power beyond that of the state.

The Rembau MP was overflowing with political correct bromides that stand out, among them, "It is not just political parties that are made up of certain sectoral interests as far as ethnicity and religion is concerned. It is also how society looks at itself" - which is very true but which is something Umno-BN has never attempted to remedy.

The way Malaysian society looks at itself is exemplified by the precious "social contract" that is either vigorously defended or rejected by partisans with jaundiced interpretations of the constitution or the advocating of communal rights as a stand in for human rights.

Affirmation action fails

The fact that Pakatan partisans sometimes equate this "defence" with the civil rights movement in America makes a mockery of the road travelled by people who were far more committed to the ideals of a civilised and just society than the communal rights advocates and the crypto racists within their ranks.

This myopic narrative of Malaysian racial/economic politics continues in the proposed Social Inclusion Act drafted by Saya Anak Bangsa Malaysia (SABM) and the National Human Rights Society (Hakam). Understand now that I am supportive of the aims of both these organisation and Pakatan, but neither of them is offering anything new beyond the idea that the "game" would be played more equitably.

Now, at first glance this may seem like an attractive proposition but the reality is that as long as we are bound by the racial shackles of our past and no new ideas ("new" does not necessarily mean "original") are injected into the political mainstream, we are doomed to commit the mistakes of our past.

Under the rather loaded title ‘Building a more just and caring nation', Azmi Sharom endorses (while also acknowledging that the proposed Act is in need of fine tuning) the proposed Act as a good first step in realising the ideal explicit in the title of his piece.

As always, there is that caveat to appease Malay communal fears when it comes to a needs-based approach, which is "I agree that the largest number of poor households is still largely Malay. This being the case, if we discard ethnic-based policy-making and focus purely on poverty alleviation, the largest group that would be receiving help will still be Malays", which at the end is merely the sleight-of-hand political speak of Pakatan (not that I am implying that Sharom is a partisan) to appease a certain ethnic voting base.

I am still unclear on the whole ‘Malay' deal. Are we talking about bumiputeras or constitutionally-created Malays, which include immigrants fast-tracked to citizenship and Malaydom, or people who self-identify themselves as Malays because of their religion of choice, Islam?

I don't see how it is ‘civilised' to endorse a supposed colour blind policy all the while reassuring a certain ethnic group that they would be taken care of solely based on their race because they (without serious unbiased holistic study) fulfil the ‘needs' criteria.

To my thinking the fact that the majority Malay community (and the rest of us Malaysians) have suffered from an affirmative action policy, perhaps the best course of action, at least as a temporary measure, is to abandon the idea of affirmative action.

Thomas Sowell in his provocative essay "Affirmative Action: A World Wide Disaster" (1989) tells of his research on countries where such policies, either race-based or needs-based, list several "patterns" that have a deleterious effect on any given society. I will list them here for convenience:

From the article:

1. Preferential programmes, even when explicitly and repeatedly defined as "temporary", have tended not only to persist but also to expand in scope, either embracing more groups or spreading to wider realms for the same groups or both. Even preferential programmes established with legally mandated cut-off dates in India and Pakistan have been continued past those dates by subsequent extensions.

2. Within these groups designated by government as recipients of preferential treatment, the benefits have disproportionately gone to those members already more fortunate.

3. Group polarisation has tended to increase in the wake of preferential treatment programmes, with non-preferred groups reacting adversely, in ways ranging from political backlash to mob violence and civil war.

4. Fraudulent claims of belonging to beneficiary groups have been widespread and taken many forms in various countries.

Superficial treatment

Readers are encouraged to slog through the 22 pages of Sowell's piece if only to remind them that there are alternatives to the current Malaysian discourse. Many Malaysian voices that advocate the same have been excluded for reasons ranging from political expediency, blind loyalty to party or Umno state-sanctioned reprisals, and of course the big one, disrupting the social contract and inflaming racial sentiment.

Of course, this piece should not be considered an attack against affirmative action (although by all means consider it such, especially if you see Sowell's "patterns" in the current Malaysian social and political climate) but rather a superficial treatment of an option that we as Malaysians should consider if we are to truly move forward.

We have a bloated civil service (and we have seen how well that worked out for Greece) and a corporate sector rife with racism as a mirror to the public sector. Our education system is in shambles with big business and fly-by-night operators colluding with the federal government to engineer an eco-system where public funds would be used to subsidise corporate interests. In this climate, do we really need an affirmative action policy?

Khairy in one of his more exuberant post-2008 tsunami moments wondered out aloud if the concept of "Ketuanan Melayu" could be reimagined as "Kepimpinan Melayu". If Kepimpinan Melayu had ever advocated abandoning its affirmative action policies after realising the futility of social engineering the Umno way, then perhaps Malay leadership would be something every Malaysian would subscribe to.

As it is, ‘Malay' leadership is accepted as a necessary consequence of the racial political reality in this land. To quote Sowell, "When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear." Unfortunately, the last bit does not apply solely to Umno.

---

S THAYAPARAN is Commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy.

Conquer the back to school blues with Google tools

Conquer the back to school blues with Google tools: August is both an end to the lush freedom of summer and the beginning of another year of student life. As a rising senior at the University of Florida, this time is both exciting and anxiety-inducing. Even though I’m looking forward to many aspects of the school year, there are certain things about college—from book budgets to calculus study sessions—that can make it a headache.



But this fall, I feel more prepared to face the daily student grind. This summer, I had the chance to intern on the communications team at Google and got the inside track on some tools and tricks to make school a snap. For example, did you know there was an extension for Chrome that helps you stay focused on your work? Yup, didn’t think so! So I thought I’d share some of my new favorite tips—my “Survival Guide for Student Life”—to help make it easier for all students to get through the coming months.



Easy ways to coordinate your social and extracurricular life

• Google+ Hangouts enables you to video chat with up to nine friends from your desktop, mobile phone or tablet. A great feature for when your club needs to discuss some last minute changes for the upcoming meeting.
• Stay on task with Hangout Apps like Symphonical, which provides a digital wall of sticky notes for virtual brainstorm sessions.
• With Google+ Events, invite all your friends to your get-together and attach a personalized video greeting to the invitation. During the event, photos from the party can be uploaded to the event page in real-time using Party Mode. So if you have to miss a party due to a study session, you can avoid that pesky FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)!
• Let your friends know what you’re up to by sharing your Google Calendar with them. Or create a shared calendar just for your study group.

Stay organized and efficient—and be prepared for the unexpected

• Stop the email flood from the ridiculous number of email lists you signed up for using Gmail’s auto-unsubscribe feature.
• No more sore eyes from crowded inboxes—Gmail's default mode is Priority Inbox so it automatically sorts your important messages for you.
• Cite your sources! Use Google Docs’ research tool to investigate highlighted portions of your essay and then generate a citation.
• Group projects call for collaboration. With Google Drive, you can use shared folders so everyone can access materials without having to email updates to each other.
• Using your laptop or phone, you can send any documents or presentations saved on your Google Drive to Fedex to be printed, thanks to Google Cloud Print.

Get what you need and where you’re going faster

• For those of you starting at university this year, Google Maps has 360-degree panoramic Street View imagery for many campuses around the world to give you a preview of your new stomping grounds.
• Back to school shopping is one of the most fun things about August. Find your way in and out of malls and department stores with indoor Google Maps on Android devices.
• We college students can’t go too long without homemade food. Search for your next flight home with Flight Search. (If flying makes you a bit queasy, track any care packages by typing the tracking code into the Google search bar.)
• Stay informed with Google Now. This feature, available on Android devices running Jelly Bean, can update you when the next bus is coming or provide the weather forecast for Saturday’s big game.

Reading, writing, 'rithmetic and... YouTube

• Don’t break the bank on textbooks. Google Play has of millions of FREE (emphasis is important) books readily available such as "Pride and Prejudice" and "Gulliver’s Travels."
• With the new Nexus 7 tablet, you can take your Google Play books, music, movies, TV shows, magazines and apps (like My Majors and doubleTwist Alarm Clock) with you, wherever you go.
• Locate hard-to-find books online or at a library near you with Book Search.
• Put Chrome to work with educational apps. 
• Not a fan of traditional note taking? Chromebooks are a super fast and virus-proof laptop. It starts seconds after you boot it and will last through a whole day of classes.
• A fair portion of us students aren’t fans of mental math. Type any equation into the Google search box to get the answers you need. It can graph functions as well.
• We know we spend too much of our time watching funny videos on YouTube, but there are video channels that can actually help us learn more about a variety of subjects—from astrophysics to world history. Find more educational channels at YouTube EDU.

I’m resting a bit easier now that I know there are tools that make student life a bit less overwhelming. Here’s hoping you, too, feel armed to face the fall semester—and beyond—with Google in your backpack.

Posted by Jenise Araujo, BOLD Intern, Communications Team

Is Your Doctor Healthier Than You? - The Atlantic

Is Your Doctor Healthier Than You? - The Atlantic

Whether your primary care doctor keeps fit can determine the quality of your own care. Here are eight charts that explain the state of physician fitness in the United States.
Reuters
Your doctor's job is to make sure you stay healthy. But what about his own well-being? If your physician isn't in shape, it's a sign you may be receiving inferior care. In a recent Johns Hopkins University study, physicians were found to be much less likely to talk to their patients about weight if they were overweight themselves. Ninety-three percent of primary care doctors admitted diagnosing obesity only when it was clear that the patient was heavier than the physician. Overlooking the weight issue might make for a happier doctor-patient relationship -- but then, politeness never reduced anyone's risk of diabetes.
If the quality of your doctor's care fluctuates with his own fitness, it's worth asking just how healthy America's physicians are. Do they exercise more than the rest of us? Have heart disease and diabetes at greater rates? Suffer from depression and commit suicide with the same frequency that we do?
The good news first: doctors are good at avoiding risky behavior. Compared to everyone else, they almost never smoke, they rarely drink, and they lack many of the obesity-related chronic illnesses that are threatening to overwhelm the country's health-care system. Those data come from the Physicians' Health Study II (PHS-II), a 10-year clinical trial involving over 14,000 middle-aged male doctors that concluded in 2006.
The bad news, though, is that those same doctors suffer from problems that are harder to detect at a glance. They often have high blood pressure and cholesterol. Many suffer from depression -- and attempt suicide -- at greater rates than the rest of the country. It's hard to say whether the job has much to do with it, although studies also show that students in medical school also report feelings of depression in remarkable proportions.
Comparable polls of female physicians are less exhaustive, unfortunately - they're limited to a handful of minimally-informative metrics.
For male and female doctors alike, the most recent statistics available mainly date to the late 1990s. Due to the variance across studies, not all of the numbers allow for an apples-to-apples comparison. Still, even a rough matchup reveals that doctors differ vastly in many ways from the rest of us -- but in other ways, we're just the same.
OBESITY

The clinical definition of obesity is having a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or greater. Among male physicians, the obesity rate is only 11 percent. That's pretty impressive, especially when more than a third of all Americans are considered obese. Meanwhile, 41 percent of doctors have a "normal" BMI of less than 25, outpacing comparable middle-aged Americans by 18 percentage points.
But just because doctors aren't obese doesn't mean they're all slim. Another 47 percent of male physicians suffer from excessive weight, according to the baseline survey -- about three and a half percentage points higher than the average male American in middle age.

EXERCISE

Americans on the whole actually exercise a bit more than doctors do. In 2009, a Gallup-Healthways poll found that just over 68 percent of Americans exercised at least once per week. Only 60 percent of male physicians could say the same. Thirty-one percent of Americans admitted to not exercising at all, compared to 38 percent of doctors participating in PHS-II.

DIET

The only representative data we have in terms of diet is a measure of sufficient intake of fruit and vegetables. Despite advances in some states, Americans nationally still aren't meeting targets. Just 26 percent of us manage three to five servings of vegetables per day, and 14 percent of us get three to five servings of fruit. That means as many as 86 percent of Americans are missing out on some of their necessary fruits or vegetables daily. Data on female physicians don't seem to paint a prettier picture: about 15 percent of doctors surveyed said they got five or more fruits or vegetables in their diet per day.

SMOKING

More than half of male physicians say they've never smoked. Forty percent say they used to, but have since quit. Only four percent still smoke on a regular basis. That's compared to 23 percent of Americans aged 45-64 who say they smoke. Of course, members of older generations come from a time when smoking was more prevalent; overall, the rate of smoking among the entire adult U.S. population stands at 19.3 percent.

BLOOD PRESSURE

Doctors admit to having hypertension at far greater rates than other Americans in their cohort. Forty-two percent of those participating in PHS-II said they had high blood pressure. By contrast, among all men aged 40-59 in 2006, only about a third said the same. And among all men over the age of 18, the rate of hypertension was 28 percent in 1999. By 2005, that figure had risen to about 30 percent.

CHOLESTEROL

In 1999, a quarter of all middle-aged men in America had high cholesterol. People in the same age bracket today have high cholesterol at a rate of about 17 percent. Both numbers are actually more promising compared to middle-aged male physicians, 35 percent of whom admitted in 1997 of having high cholesterol or that they were being treated for it. Of all American men, just 12 percent had high cholesterol as of 2010.

DIABETES

Male physicians suffer from diabetes at remarkably low rates compared to the rest of us -- just six percent. Last year, nearly 14 percent of men aged 45-64 and 12 percent of men older than 20 carried a diabetes diagnosis.

CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE

According to data from PHS-II, 95 percent of doctors were heart disease-free in 1997. Just five percent reported a history of cardiovascular disease (including non-fatal heart attacks and strokes). By comparison, among the general population (see page 16), 12 percent of men of all ages had some type of heart disease in 2010. Roughly the same was true for Americans of both sexes aged 45-64 (the report doesn't break the data down for middle-aged men, unfortunately).

DEPRESSION
Regrettably, this is one of the only subjects in which data on women physicians is actually more readily available than information about male physicians. Estimates suggest that some 20 percent of female primary care doctors have a history of depression, and as many as 1.5 percent have attempted suicide. Among U.S. women as a whole, just over 3.5 percent reported feelings of perpetual sadness in 2010. About 2.3 percent said they felt hopeless all the time, two percent said they felt worthelss all or most of the time, and six percent said everything they did was an effort all or most of the time.

CAUSES OF DEATH
All of these health conditions raise the risk of death. But what actually ends up killing most doctors? Turns out, they're a lot like the rest of us in that respect:
Top 10 leading causes of death in the U.S. in 1990 and white male physicians' proportionate mortality ratios (compared with that of all white male professionals) for each cause.

Compared to the rest of the population, doctors die of heart disease just a little bit less, cancer a little bit less, and flu a lot less. The key numbers are under the "proportionate mortality ratio" column, where figures above 100 indicate a greater likelihood of death from a given cause relative to the average citizen, and numbers below 100 indicate a reduced likelihood. As the data on depression might suggest, doctors are far more likely to die by suicide than the average American.
Here's a different breakdown of the data, ranking the causes of doctor death by the things that are most likely to knock them off relative to non-doctors:
Occupational mortality surveillance data, 1984-1995; selected sources of reduced and elevated mortality among white male physicians.

Brian Fung - Brian Fung is an associate editor at The Atlantic. He has written previously for Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, and Talking Points Memo.

Funny FedExCup 2012 ads

Funny FedExCup 2012 ads:

Loving the 2012 FedExCup PGA tournament ads. Created by BBDO New York, these ads emphasise FedEx's golf club box and unique pack and ship services. First one's my favourite. Third one sucks, don't bother watching (don't say I didn't warn you).

Have a great Friday!

FedExCup Ad: Check-In

FedExCup Ad: Band

FedExCup Ad: Arnold Palmer Tea

Control Google TV Directly From Chrome On Your PC / Mac [VIDEO]

Control Google TV Directly From Chrome On Your PC / Mac [VIDEO]:
Google TV is just one of a slew of web-centered streaming content services, but is quickly becoming one of the most popular, with Vizio - manufacturer of the Co-Stora set-top box for Google TV - struggling to keep a decent amount set-top in stock due to high demand. For those of you using Google TV ( I know there are many of you), a new extension for Chrome will allow you to control GTV straight from the browser, working in much the same fashion as the numerous remote apps for Android.



Continue reading this article at RedmondPie.com