We’ve written a few times about Cyberchondria, the “disease” where patients come into the office with a self-diagnosis pulled from the Internet. Sometimes the patients are shockingly accurate, but oftentimes they misdiagnose and overdiagnose.
A recent interesting article in Time suggested that “Googling Symptoms Helps Patients and Doctors.” The article, written by Dr. Zachary F. Meisel, points [...]
Here’s an interesting article that reports on the follow-up to an iPad initiative in medicine we told you about last May. The article says that residents using iPads at the University of Chicago hospital became more efficient at ordering tests and procedures than those who didn’t use the devices. Call me a skeptic. What the article [...]
Social media gives users access to health news and opinions like never before. This has its perks—informed patients, support groups, and more. It also has its downfalls, like our recently discussed Cyberchondria. And the latest news—it has given rogue pharmacies the opportunity to market illicit and prescription drugs online.
The International Narcotics Control Board reported on [...]
Recently we wrote about how Twitter helped revealed the cholera outbreak in Haiti before health officials reported it. In researching that article, we stumbled upon “HealthMap“, an interesting website that aggregates data from several sources to report on spreading epidemics around the world in real time.
The site can be used by health departments, governments, health [...]
Recently the American Medical Association (AMA) posted an article about “Cyperchondria“, the term given to patients who come into a doctor’s office with a diagnosis in hand that they found on the Internet. As the “disease” name suggests, mostly these worries are unfounded and the result of too much information being available about symptoms like [...]
When the swine flu first came on the scene, the social media world was all a-Twitter. Tweets about the swine flu skyrocketed and, in fact, were at their highest when reported cases of the flu were at their lowest. This could be interpreted that Twitter is useless when it comes to tracking disease (although clearly [...]
The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons expects knee replacements to jump by more than 600% by 2030. With the aging population and better technology, shoulder and ankle replacements are also increasing.
And aging boomers not only are getting more surgeries, but because of the information-loaded Internet, they are showing up more informed about possibilities than ever before. And [...]
From Marc Battaglia of TheSparkReport: “Doctor visits have steadily declined since 2007. Your first thought may be, ‘well of course, they’re just finding information online — or getting advice from friends.’ But surprisingly, surveys show they’re not doing that either.”
The article goes on to explain that in a recent survey, The Center for Studying Health [...]
Odds are if you’re a physician who has Googled yourself, you’ve found some online reviews left by patients. Many of these reviews will be positive, but no matter how good a physician you are, you are likely to find negative reviews as well. Especially in cases where you feel the negative reviews are untrue or [...]
You may have heard the buzzword “mHealth” thrown around recently, as it seems to be gaining traction in the language of health technology. I recently stumbled across it in research, and even wrote about it, without giving much thought to the word, in a recent post, “Healthcare apps to reach more than a billion downloads by 2016.”
According to [...]
