11th November 2009
Much of the American health system is outdated, inefficient and excessively expensive. Many have written about what is wrong with our system, and how important is the process of health reform. But relatively little has been written about what is required ...
21st October 2009
I had a rewarding experience last week when one of my patients asked me a range of excellent questions about their condition. I had just diagnosed them as having an anxiety disorder. This patient was clearly concerned about possible medication side effect...
12th October 2009
The way most doctors and health care professionals do their jobs has hardly changed over the past thirty to forty years. Contrast this with the enormous changes in, say, transport, manufacturing and telecommunications!
But hang on to your stethoscopes!...
05th October 2009
When was the last time you visited your doctor? What was it like? What happened? How did you communicate? Were you listened to? Were you able to develop, or deepen, your therapeutic relationship with them? Who else was part of the consultation? Was your d...
18th September 2009
Virtual reality techniques, involving three-dimensional imaging and surround sound, are increasingly being used in diagnosis, treatment, and medical education. Initial applications of virtual reality in medicine involved visualization of the complex data ...
18th September 2009
Increasing numbers of people are using the Internet for the provision of all sorts of health services, from prescribing, through consulting to setting up automated self-treatment programs. But what about using it for education and therapy? After all, in t...
19th August 2009
Blogs have now become ubiquitously available. Just as the Internet is widespread and accessible, becoming cheaper, better understood and more user-friendly and flexible, so are blogs becoming more common and important. Access to blogs is increasingly via ...
31st July 2009
The current debate on health reform is getting lost in the numbers and dollars game in Congress. The arguments have become about price. What is the cheaper option? How can we pay for it? What is the best value? It is about the health insurance industry de...
20th July 2009
Let's pretend that President Obama is actually Dr Obama, and that his job is to diagnose and treat the US Health System. What will he find, how will he go about it, and what will be the outcome?
The process of diagnosis is relatively straight forward. ...
09th July 2009
Dr Stanley Borg, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, recently wrote that "whatever your views on the flaws and failures of the US health care system, you have to admit that things are changing. Make no mistake: online care is a game change...
27th June 2009
It is clear that most stakeholders in the health industry now support President Obama's view that it is essential that we have substantial healthcare reform, and soon. The arguments around the issue are not whether this should happen, but how and when it ...
12th June 2009
There is much debate about the type of insurance proposals that will be required in the new health system currently being negotiated in Congress. President Obama has just come out in support of a public health plan, which is opposed by private insurers wh...
11th June 2009
When will swine flu reappear in the Northern Hemisphere? Next September of October is the most likely time.
Most pandemics go through a well described series of three peaks of infection rate. There is an initial outbreak, that we have just had, followe...
04th June 2009
Doctors are starting to redesign the way they work to link better with patients and to use the newly available multi-media technologies. This is an important process that will undoubtedly accelerate over the next 20 years. There is a need to substantially...
29th May 2009
We have all heard the term Web 2.0. It refers to a second generation of websites and activities mainly involving social networking websites like MySpace and FaceBook. A related recent term is Health 2.0 which is the use of Web 2.0 methods for healthcare. ...
