Blog Rounds II

Look what the Google Reader brought home, a series of articles on everything from pharmaceutical advertising to valentine's day and facebook... let's get started:

TBTAM gives pharma advertising a piece of her mind in an old post worth bringing back for those healthcare reform fanatics out there. Yes, we need to have more infromed patients and make healthcare decisions as a team. No, we do not need big pharma giving patients strategies to convince their doc to get the latest and greatest test from their company. Anyone know if the current bills in congress or any proposals for that matter, do anything about direct to consumer advertising?

Regardless of the commercials, Distractable posits that if PCP's didn't have to deal with medicare and medicaid, they would be able to have good businesses that would attract new grads and make house calls again. If any future public option looks like those programs (mountains of paperwork and restrictive reimbursements) then we're in trouble...and though it's not the direct topic posted, CC wonders how she'll choose a residency program in a rural area if she's not already married. I commented that this plays into that family medicine/rural physician shortage in unexpected ways and even relates back to medical school admissions policies favoring unmarried 22yo's that don't want to work in areas where they have no chance of meeting people.

Complicating healthcare reform further is the fact that a lot of our healthcare bills are from self-inflected wounds such as obesity. While difficult, this is an issue that will likely be solved through a cultural shift rather than left to Washington (though we'll need help) and Jamie Oliver has some ideas...

Speaking of ideas, TechCrunch wonders what the world would be like if those facebook programmers turned their talents onto social causes...a few medical ideas are mentioned, anyone out there know of other apps like those?

OK coffee is finished and I REALLY need to get to school before my sunscreen wears off... enjoy!

Blog Rounds

Edit Note: As pointed out by my former roommate and subsequently confirmed on Urban Dictionary, Gunner more appropriately means someone that will do anything to get ahead and purposely sabotage fellow students/workers to get ahead. The definition of gunner below better resembles geeky over-achiever.

Starting a new tradition to get myself to post more often: Blog Rounds. Since I am not allowed anywhere near patients for quite some time, I figured I could do a weekly webside routine with various blogs of the medical world. And yes, it was inspired by Grand Rounds except that theirs is interesting and GRAND. I'm just looking to consolidate the stories I found in Google Reader ;)

So let's begin:

The Blog that Ate Manhattan did a nice job of summarizing the med blogosphere's thoughts on the iPad as well as giving her own opinion. The tablet concept for hardware appears to have obvious uses in medicine, but the details will get worked out in the software realm.

Callous Callostomy meanwhile tackles the 'gunner' attitude head on. At any school there are people that see those that work hard academically and like to poke fun, it's the same at med school (here too). I have two thoughts on this: 1. The number of times someone uses Gunner is in direct proportion to the number of hours they are secretly studying their a** off while pretending not to be/care. 2. C'mon people! We are in med school - the harder you work the better doc you will be and people's lives depend on us knowing stuff, not just knowing enough to pass the boards.

Finally, just in time for my Neuroscience class is a nice post from Dr. Shock on the neuroscience of jazz. I plan on re-reading this once I have finished Neuro as looking at it now I see lots of terms already mentioned in class... that I should be studying!

That's all for this round... time to hit the handouts.