Thursday, October 6, 2011

Translational research and wireless technologies

Eric Topol, Director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute at TEDMED 2009 offered a compelling vision of the convergence of medical practice and mobile technologies. Dr. Ricardo Azziz, President of Georgia Health Sciences University and CEO of Georgia Health Sciences Health System, recently shared his vision of clinical and translational research. These are surely exciting times as we may be approaching some kind of medical-technological singularity beyond which the future will become difficult to predict.

http://azziz.georgiahealth.edu/archives/367

Sunday, October 2, 2011

The iPatient and the real patient

In this TED video physician Abraham Verghese of Stanford University makes his case for the importance of ritual in patient care, saying that technology can become the focus of a physician's attention at the expense of the need of the patient for a human relationship with his or her medical caregiver. He cites the need for a listening to the patient and giving a through physician examination in person as a way of gaining the confidence of the patient in a way that a scans and lab tests cannot. It seems to me that the challenge is to retain the ritual while including the technology. We live in a world in which friendship is increasingly being understood in context of social media rather than in the context of physical proximity and time spent together. Cyberspace is amazing and allows for social connections that would not otherwise be possible. Medicine is very largely about data, information and knowledge. It is also about caring for the actual person.

http://cnn.com/video/?/video/living/2011/10/01/ted-abraham-verghese.ted