What doctors don't know about the drugs they prescribe : Video

Medical Journalism and communication has become sensationalistic. Potentially beneficial results are overhyped and harmful possibilities simply brushed under the rug. Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings.

When a new drug gets tested, the results of the trials should be published for the rest of the medical world -- except much of the time, negative or inconclusive findings go unreported, leaving doctors and researchers in the dark. In this impassioned talk, Ben Goldacre explains why these unreported instances of negative data are especially misleading and dangerous.

Wikipedia Is The Most Popular Professional Web 2.0 Tool Among Doctors

Physicians are making increasing use of the social web. A recent study by  Insight Research Group (pdf) looked at use of social web by 300 primary care doctors in the first quarter of 2011, drawing equal numbers from Germany, Italy and the UK.

Here is the gist of the research.

• The agency found 69% of European physicians said they used some form of social media for work, whereas 85% of them made personal use of social media.
• Wikipedia to be the most popular destination there. 60% of doctors surveyed said they used Wikipedia professionally.
• After Wikipedia, the most popular sites were YouTube (used professionally by 18% of respondents ), Facebook (5.7%), LinkedIn (4.7%) and Twitter (1.3%).

Niche professional uses of community resources like Wikipedia, Youtube and Facebook is now finding acceptance within the professional medical circles. With more than 60,000 Indian doctors on Facebook out of an estimated total of 700,000 doctors in India, Expect to see a similar scenario in India within 2 to 3 years.

Related articles

• How Is Social Media Used In Healthcare: Infographic (edrneelesh.blogspot.com)
• International Social Media Trends (beingyourbrand.wordpress.com)

Indian Medical Association Plans Programs to Make Members Tech Savvy

The potential of improving Healthcare quality by proper use of technology is immense.Recent advances in information technology offer clinicians valuable new tools to support the medical management of patients. HIT has the potential to enable a dramatic transformation in the delivery of health care, making it safer, more effective, and more efficient.

The national unit of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) has decided to make its two lakh members across the country, especially senior medical practitioners, more tech savvy. The National vice-president of IMA, Dr Devendra Shirole says,“Short contact programs of four days will be organized at all local branches of the IMA. Doctors will be trained on how to use information technology for the betterment of medical profession and patents’ data collection.” He said the doctors will be also trained on using e-books in their daily practice.

The IMA will launch this project initially in Maharashtra and the inauguration will take place in Mumbai. Groups, formed for research purposes, will use information technology to study diseases and viruses.To undertake this vast project, talks are on with software companies to provide trainings and technical support, as well as help IMA build web pages for the same.

Also See:

• Costs and Benefits of Health Information Technology
• Technoclinics- Upcoming scenario in India

Social Media and a Medical Practitioner: Guide from 'Down Under'

Research Projects like those carried out by pathoftheblueeye.com as well as by Accenture have pointed out Medscape.com and WebMD.com as the most often visited sites by Medical Professionals ( 50 % of the time spent within health category) as well as non-medicos. Social Media sites showed  a rapidly rising 6% of time spent by a large number of people.

Social Media is now being widely used by doctors as well as patients. All doctors even remotely on social media face many ethical and moral questions regarding online physician-patient relationships. So when is it Okay to use social media and when is it Not ?!

Recently, The American Medical association posted some guidelines for Doctors use of social media tools in a professional capacity.

But now we have the Australia Medical Association and New Zealand Medical Association come out with their version on this dilemma. Here is the google document ( a 14 page pdf you can download/ view online). It is one of the most practical and useful guide of its kind online.

Attached: Social Media and the Medical Profession_FINAL with links.pdf

Related articles

• AMA Issues Social Networking Guidelines (medgadget.com)
• Social Media Policy Adopted by the American Medical Association (healthblawg.typepad.com)

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• Using Web 2.0 technologies and social media for the cardiologist's education and update (medicineandtechnology.com)

--Data for Doctors--

E-Health Insider :: From data to information to transformation

Information is power. Everywhere.
Information is made up of chunks of data put together into a meaningful structure.

As health care professionals, we produce lots of data everyday when we treat our patients. It includes the patient"s past habits, family history, past diseases, current symptoms, response to certain drugs, reactions to drugs......and on and on.

We need to be able to collect and collate all this data so as to help us in making better decisions in the future. The currently followed practise commonly is -- we treat all the patients according to what we were taught in medical school--.

But illness and disease don't remain static. They evolve everyday. They follow the path of least resistance. Whenever a disease finds a path not blocked by doctors, it pursues rapidly down that path.And we doctors are left guarding only the fixed doorways that we were taught of in Medical school ( or even later, via medical journals)

The only way to stay in the game is to continuously monitor the evolution of the disease by real-time/continuous data gathering and monitoring. This helps us spot very early trends in disease evolution and "block" those paths and escape routes for all diseases.

This article here provides some very good examples and methods of data capturing for clinicians. I hope all doctors in India soon realize the importance of data gathering and analysis in their day-to-day practice.

Read more.