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In a sense, value is the glue that holds our world together. Thus knowledge is inextricably valued; divorced from the reality of personal choice, it is useless and irrelevant.

—Alfred Tauber, Patient Autonomy and the Ethics of Responsibility (via @subatomicdoc)

Link Social Media and Medicine with @amyvernon et. al. in Miami for @astro_org in October 2011

This past fall, I was fortunate enough to convince Amy Vernon, Amy Grantham, and Terry Hall to speak about social media in medicine. They did a fantastic job of presenting what social media is, how patients use it and some of the pitfalls for health professionals. We got fantastic feedback, which doesn’t surprise me given the great presentations. It’s long but you should be able to skip through if you want. Enjoy!

Link Biomedical Ephemera, or: A Frog for Your Boils: Medicine in History: Ancient Egypt - Pharmacology

Fascinating. Interestingly, honey is making a comeback — I’m using it with radiation therapy.

biomedicalephemera:

Putting aside the major strides forward the Egyptians made in establishing medicine, some of their cures were still pretty wild, even without the mysticism aspect. A few of them (from the writings of Herodotus, the Kahun Gynecological papyrus, and the Ebers and Edwin Smith papyri):

For cure…

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The Care of the Patient

In all your patients whose symptoms are of functional origin, the whole problem of diagnosis and treatment depends on your insight into the patient’s character and personal life, and in every case of organic disease there are complex interactions between the pathologic processes and the intellectual processes which you much appreciate and consider if you would be a wise clinician….Disease in man is never exactly the same as disease in an experimental animal, for in man the disease at once affects and is affected by what we call the emotional life. Thus, the physician who attempts to take care of a patient while he neglects this factor is as unscientific as the investigator who neglects to control all the conditions that may affect his experiment. The good physician knows his patient through and through, and his knowledge is bought dearly. Time, sympathy and understanding must be lavishly dispensed, but the reward is to be found in that personal bond which forms the greatest satisfaction of the practice of medicine. One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.

Francis W. Peabody, M.D. in “The Care of the Patient”, JAMA (March 19,1927) 88:882

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The Care of the Patient